What Can We Learn From Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround?

As the cliché goes, the internet changed everything, and more than two decades after it arrived, it hasn’t finished changing things yet. The movement of sales from brick-and-mortar stores to online retailers, which overwhelmingly means Amazon, and the new reality that consumers find out about books largely through online channels have required publ

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When I was in grad school, the unstated assumption in most of what we were taught was that the sole point of a business (or any institution, really) was to grow. To grow, grow, grow, to as large a scale as possible. To build an empire, take over the world. My classmates — tycoons in waiting — lapped it up. “Lifestyle businesses”? Nah! Those were fo... See more