Truth and Target

Gregg Steinhafel left Target last week and now all manner of recriminations are pouring out. Perhaps the most interesting one came yesterday from Jeff Jones, a senior executive there, who did something very un-Target like: he went public:

In an unusual move, Target’s chief marketing officer posted a 750-word candid commentary titled “The Truth Hurts” on the networking site late Monday. By Tuesday, it was blowing up on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, sparking discussions about the “Target culture” and the need for the Minneapolis-based retailer to innovate.

The piece served as a rallying call for Target employees who have been battered for months with one piece of bad news after another — from missteps in the retailer’s expansion into Canada to the massive data breach to sluggish sales in the United States. And then last week, Gregg Steinhafel, the company’s chief executive, stepped down. Amid so much turmoil and public scrutiny, Jeff Jones’ words struck a chord. He wrote frankly about Target hitting a “rough patch” and of the urgency to challenge the company’s way of doing things in order to resurrect the brand.

“The culture of Target is an enormous strength and might be our current Achilles heel,” Jones wrote. “In the coming days and weeks we will embrace the critiques of Target — whether it’s from outsiders or our own team — like an athletics team puts the negative press on the wall in the locker room.”

Glad that you're willing to embrace the critiques -- here, have a hug, Mr. Jones. Based on my near-decade at Target, and from a decade's remove, I'd offer the following:

• One thing that really struck me when I left Target HQ is how meeting-crazed the place is. It was very easy to have 25+ hours of a typical 40-hour week filled with meetings of varying importance. Meanwhile, the work would pile up on your desk and you didn't have time to deal with it. I often had to spend a Sunday afternoon in the office to get things done that should have been done during the normal course of the day.
• One of the reasons that meetings were so commonplace was simple -- you had to get approval from multiple layers of bureaucracy to do even simple things. And it was common to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to cover your butt.
• The larger problem is that, as the old saying goes, retail is detail. Target has always differentiated itself from its competitors through its attention to detail. It was rare to see a Target store that had merchandise strewn all over the place, as you'd see in a Kmart, or a series of palletized dump bins, as you see in Walmart. Target's always had a mania for the perfect planogram, the buttoned-up 24-foot merchandising run. While this attention to detail is useful, it's not particularly helpful if people aren't finding what they need on the shelf.
• And finding things on the shelf has been an increasing problem for Target. I've said this before, but it bears repeating -- Walmart's biggest advantage is their supply chain management -- they get things to their stores much more efficiently than their competitors. Target's struggled with this for years and the solution, from what I can tell, has been to edit their offerings. The selection at a Target is considerably less than it was even five years ago.

There's more, of course. But that's a start.