Author: Eric Gardner

Reengineering Retail isn’t a bad book. It’s just…whatever. Written by Doug Stephens, Reengineering Retail tries to lay out a theory that encompasses the future of retail. The central idea is this. Digital technology has upended the traditional retail industry. The retail store is no longer a static distribution point for a product. Instead, Stephens, a self-proclaimed “consumer futurist”, sees them as “experiential media channels.” Now, throw in a bunch of business buzzwords, technology-centric case studies, and a weird 20-page diversion into innovation consulting, and you have successfully described Reengineering Retail.

Now again, on the surface, there is nothing inherently wrong about Reengineering Retail. Retailers need to get leaner, they need to reevaluate how they use store space, and they need to focus on creating experiences rather than just transactions. There are a handful of case studies in the book that made me think. The case studies are also almost uniformly geared towards high-end lifestyle retailers. Stephens would probably recommend that every grocer in America turn itself into Eatily — despite the fact that dollar discount stores are the only reliable growth engine left in retail. But then again, dollar stores aren’t as fun or exciting as having a private chef teach cooking lessons to sell more cheese.

I think that’s my biggest issue with the book. Reengineering Retail’s overall premise is probably true, but it spends the bulk of the time trying to make its’ case through buzzwords and glittering objects rather than the nuts and bolts of retail.

Let’s take his discussion of “building a network.” Stevens argues that in the future, successful retailers will build networks, not empires. Now, he never actually defines what he means by a network. Instead, he gives a string of loosely collected buzzwords.

Networks, on the other hand, are capital-light, structurally lean and able to scale rapidly. They operate on transparency and a sense of shared ownership with peer-to-peer trust and governance. Their success ultimately depends on a balanced scorecard of stakeholder interests, from shareholders to employees and network partners. They are more fluid, flexible and adaptable to change, in part because they offer an intrinsically broader collective market intelligence.

First off, the “they operate on…” sentence is just describing joint business planning, a business function almost all retailers use to some extent. Secondly, “Intrinsically broader collective market intelligence…” Who is he kidding? I get what he’s probably trying to say. That the wisdom of the crowds is more significant than any one individual buyer. But how does that translate to brick and mortar retail? From a back-end operations perpsective it doesn’t.

Retail is a complex operation. For manufacturers, sorry, partners, roughly speaking you have a team that creates a good, a procurement team that figures out a way to buy the raw materials, a supply team that figures out how much to make, a demand team that forecasts how much and when retailers will buy, a sales team that sells the product to retailers, a finance team that makes sure they make money, and a customer service team that handles any issues. The retailer then, has a similar organization, only on its side.

How does this fit into Reengineering Retail’s network model? Well, it doesn’t. At least not to the extent that Stevens insinuates. A more rational future state would include major investments into warehouse management, inventory control, and trade planning software. The efficiencies gained from those could free up massive amounts of capital to invest in the “experiences” that Stevens suggest.

But that’s not nearly as innovative as a network, now is it?

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Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, spent the last decade establishing himself as one of the pre-eminent antitrust thinkers. In the Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, Wu used a wide-angle lens to examine the implications of the rising information cartels on American business and society. In The Curse of Bigness, Wu takes a magnifying glass to industrial concentration and the economic and political dangers it creates. The book succinctly distills a generation of research into one easily digestible volume. In this The Curse of Bigness Review, I summarize the main argument that Tim Wu’s central arguments

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The Fall of Wisconsin, a 2018 book by New Yorker’s Dan Kaufman, analyzes how conservatives utilized Dark Money, Gerrymandering, and Weak Democratic opposition to enact a radical and dangerous conservative agenda in Wisconsin. “(Their) devastating success has allowed for the transformation of Wisconsin into a laboratory for corporate interests and conservative activists,” Kaufman writes. Act 10 (rightly) receives the majority of the press, but it’s really one of many extreme changes the Republican Party brought to Wisconsin. In the last two years, the Republican-controlled Senate supported a bill to remove all of the state’s air-pollution regulations. This book review will outline Kaufman’s core thesis and help explain how three forces, Dark Money, Gerrymandering, and weak Democratic Opposition created a nightmare scenario.

Dark Money fueled the Fall of Wisconsin

The Citizen’s United decision effectively allowed corporations to launder political spending through non-profits. According to Issue One, a non-partisan campaign finance reform organization, just 15 groups have spent more than $600 million “in secret money” influencing our elections. In Wisconsin, no organization has been more potent than the Bradley Foundation. Initially established by a Milwaukee industrialist looking to avoid inheritance taxes, it initially focuses on area hospitals and universities. In the 1980s it transitioned into a weaponized conservative outlet—focusing on school vouchers, destroying unions, and promoting white supremacy masked in academic jargon. The foundation’s assets have ballooned to nearly $850 million.

The Bradley Foundation’s most significant success has been Act 10—legislation that stripped collective bargaining rights from the state’s public workers (except police and firefighters—two groups who were neutral or supported Walker’s initial election). The legislation kick-started massive teacher protests, which Walker later compared to ISIS. The effects have been devastating for the state’s educational system. According to an analysis by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Act 10 resulted in a 30% drop in state granted education degrees resulting in 25 percent of school districts reporting an “extreme shortage” of qualified applicants. “Teaching,” current Governor-elect Tony Evers remarked at the time, “no longer considered an attractive career path.”

Perhaps the most insidious effect was villainizing teachers. The last thirty years left many Wisconsinites behind. Instead of asking “Why they no longer had health insurance,” people started asking “Why did teachers have it?” “A Wisconsin labor leader once told me that Act 10 succeeded,” said Kauffman. The leader’s answer is both telling and depressing. “Because Walker transformed the person who spent the day in a classroom teaching his child from “teacher” to “union member.”

Gerrymandering

Once in control over Wisconsin’s government, the Republican party launched a full-throated assault on voting rights in the state. They passed restrictive voter identification laws to suppress minority and student votes and cemented control by gerrymandering election boundaries. In the first election after the rigged voting maps, Republican received 175,000 fewer votes but ended the day with a 60-39 majority. This was a fundamental part of the Republican strategy. Restrict the rights of non-Republican voters, while reducing the impact of non-Republican votes. In 2018, after Governor Walker was surprisingly beaten by State Superintendent Tony Evers, Republicans began their second assault on Democracy and voting rights.

Weak democratic opposition

A portion of Republican success in the state is due to the Democratic party. Modern democrats had no interest in defending the average working person against the Republican onslaught. President Obama declined to even campaign in Wisconsin during the passage of the bill—creating a boom for Scott Walker. The book doesn’t dive into this, but in the mid-1990s, centrist Democrats began to move away from unions as a source of natural support. The transition started with Jimmy Carter but solidified itself after NAFTA. The logic was that for every union vote they lost, they’d make it up with the professional suburbs. Led by Bill Clinton, liberals began to abandon New Deal policies and adopt market “friendly” positions. The result was market deregulation and globalization—at the same time, Democrats reduced the welfare state. The result was two parties working against working people. This directly led to Donald Trump.

Should you read The Fall of Wisconsin?

The point of every review is basically, should I read this book? After I finished The Fall of Wisconsin, I would have said no. I didn’t really learn anything during it. However, I also live in Wisconsin and am active in Wisconsin politics. As I began writing my review, I realized that Kauffman did a solid job of distilling the state’s political revolution. If you don’t live here, you should absolutely read this book. The current state of Wisconsin is the nation’s fate if Progressives don’t start winning office and exterting political power.

In Hit Makers, Derek Thompson tries to explain why some ideas become popular and others fade away. It’s an important question and one facing every content creator in today’s hyper-competitive media landscape. Technology platforms like Spotify, Facebook, and Twitter have transformed media into a winner take’s all market. How does a new band break through on Spotify—when the top one percent of acts capture 80 percent of recorded music revenue? How can a television show break through hundreds of channels and streaming options? How can an unknown writer catch-on? Hit Makers claims to answer these questions. Unfortunately, Thompson fails to offer new insights to this question. Instead, Hit Makers is a book on how cultural hits are created, published in 2017, with arguments from 2010.

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The central thesis of Nixonland, a sprawling look at the origin, rise, and decline of the Nixon administration, is that there was simmering white resentment underneath the optimism and change of the Kennedy Administration. Hidden behind the civil rights movement was a mass of unhappy middle-class white people. Nixon wasn’t the first politician to exploit white rage, that honor would go to Ronald Reagan. Nixon merely copied it, perfected it, and fractured the nation into Nixonland. Richard Nixon, Ron Perlstein writes, “so brilliantly co-opted the liberals’ populism.” Re-directing well-meaning reforms, “into a white middle-class rage at the sophisticated, the wellborn, the “best circles” — all those who looked down their noses at “you and me”…that sneered imperiously at the simple faiths of ordinary folk, their simple patriotism, their simple pleasures.”

In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson won 61.05 percent of the popular vote on a platform of expanding FDR’s New Deal to non-white Americans. Its sole goal was to eradicate poverty and racial injustice. He coined it the “Great Society.” When lighting the national Christmas Tree, President Lyndon Johnson described it as “the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” Eight years later Richard Nixon won 60.67 percent of the vote on a platform of “Law and Order”; an ideological repudiation of the Great Society. Nixonland is fundamentally about this uniquely American transformation. How America went from believing civil rights law leveled the playing field to one that held it caused race riots. How it went from viewing welfare as help for the weakest to help for the laziest. How political dissent became tantamount to treason. Nixon was at the center of it all, weaponizing a white populace’s fears into an “us versus them” political revolution. “Far from becoming a great society,” Nixon wrote in Reader’s Digest leading up to his Presidential election, “ours is becoming a lawless society.” The underlying context was that only Richard Nixon, and people like him, could protect society from the hordes of others.

Sound familiar?

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Joshua Greene’s Devil’s Bargain is ostensibly about Steve Bannon, arguably mainstream Democrats biggest boogeyman not named Vladimir Putin.

The book, of course, covers his evolution from the Navy to Goldman Sachs, to World of Warcraft, to Hollywood, and to (supposedly) anti-Goldman right-wing crusader. However, the book is really about how three well-financed forces coalesced and resulted in the election of Donald Trump to President of the United States.

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