The Stagnation Assassin Show

Send us Fan Mail You've watched the competitive landscape shift. You've read the disruption books. You've launched the innovation lab. And then — you look at your core business and realize ninety percent of capital and management attention is still flowing to the status quo. Every turnaround I've run has encountered this. The threat is visible. The response is bubble-wrapped. A...

Send us Fan Mail Seventy percent. That's McKinsey's famous finding on change program failure rates — cited in boardrooms, conferences, and consulting decks for twenty-five years. You've heard it so many times it's become wallpaper. But here's what almost no one knows: the most important finding in that research isn't the seventy percent. It's the variable McKinse...

Send us Fan Mail You've approved the five-year strategic plan. The board signed off. The 2030 vision is in the investor deck. And then — the CEO leaves in year three. The incoming leader declares a new strategic direction. And the organization's memory of the previous initiative is overwritten like an old hard drive. Every turnaround I've run has encountered this. The plan was right...

Send us Fan Mail Your finance team set the hurdle rate for capital projects using CAPM. They pulled beta from historical stock prices. They used the 10-year Treasury as the risk-free rate. They added a market risk premium from a Damodaran database. They produced a precise discount rate to four decimal places. And then they used that discount rate — built for valuing public equity — to evaluate a c...

Send us Fan Mail You've inherited a capital structure. Or you've built one. Either way, at some point you will stare at a debt-to-equity ratio and ask whether it's right — and the finance textbooks will give you an answer that is mathematically elegant and operationally useless. Modigliani and Miller proved in 1958 that in a world without taxes, bankruptcy costs, or information asym...

Send us Fan Mail You've reviewed the resume. You've conducted the interviews. You've checked the references. And then — six months in, the hire isn't performing anything like the candidate you thought you were getting. Every turnaround I've run has encountered this. The process looks rigorous. The input data is corrupted. And the hiring team is doing what hiring teams do:...

Send us Fan Mail Everyone knew premium refrigerators required water dispensers — until we launched one without it and captured 43% market share. Everyone knew stainless steel commanded a $200 premium — but the actual cost difference was $31. These comfortable delusions are protecting your competitors more than they're protecting you. In this episode, Todd Hagopian — the original Stagnation As...

Send us Fan Mail Your salesperson sells the deal that maximizes their commission. Your purchasing manager picks the vendor that makes their life easiest. Your division president hits their EBITDA number by cutting maintenance capex — and you inherit the degraded asset base next year. None of these people are acting against the company's interest out of malice. They are acting rationally in re...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine walking into your CFO's office and saying: "I want to offer every customer free shipping both ways, let them return anything within 365 days for any reason, and I want our call center agents to spend as long as they want on every single phone call." Your CFO would call security. Tony Hsieh called it a strategy. And it made Zappos worth $1.2 billion. This is...

Send us Fan Mail A product manager came to me convinced we should discontinue a product line. "It's losing money," he said. He had the P&L. Full cost allocation. The line was negative. He was right — by the fully-loaded accounting. But when I stripped out the allocated overhead and looked at contribution margin — price minus variable cost — the line was generating $4M in cash th...

Send us Fan Mail In the 1990s, the fashion industry operated on a sacred calendar: two seasons. Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter. Designers designed. Factories produced. Stores sold. The cycle took 9 to 12 months. Then a man from a small town in Galicia, Spain — Amancio Ortega — said: Why wait? And he built a machine that could take a design from a sketch on Monday to a store rack on Friday. The fash...

Send us Fan Mail For 118 years, Woolworth's was America. The five-and-dime. The lunch counter. The store where your grandmother bought everything from sewing needles to goldfish. At its peak, Woolworth's had over 8,000 stores worldwide and was housed in the tallest building on Earth. In 1997, they closed the last store. Lights off. Doors locked. Done. This isn't a business failure....

Send us Fan Mail You've written the policy. You've communicated the strategy. You've run the all-hands. You've sent the email. And then — nothing changes. Or worse, something changes for three weeks and then silently reverts to exactly how it was before. Every turnaround I've run has encountered this. The strategy is right. The operational plan is sound. And the people are...

Send us Fan Mail I have seen businesses celebrate record revenue while destroying shareholder value. I have seen divisions grow EBITDA while generating returns below their cost of capital. I have watched leadership teams be rewarded for results that were, mathematically, making the business worth less than when they started. ROIC — Return on Invested Capital — is the metric that cuts through all o...

Send us Fan Mail A retailer runs a 10% increase in demand for one week. Just one week. They reorder 20% more from their distributor — because they want safety stock. The distributor, seeing a 20% increase, orders 40% more from the manufacturer. The manufacturer runs three extra shifts and builds 60% more inventory. Six weeks later, demand is back to normal. The retailer has too much product. The d...

Send us Fan Mail I once inherited a Balanced Scorecard that had 47 KPIs across four perspectives. Beautiful cascade. Color-coded dashboards. Monthly reporting packages the size of a small novel. Nobody could tell me which three metrics mattered most. Nobody could tell me what we would do differently that week based on the scorecard. It had become what all bad measurement systems become: a reportin...

Send us Fan Mail Rick Steves could have franchised his travel business into a global tourism empire worth hundreds of millions. He was offered the deals. He turned them down. He built a company that serves one specific audience — independent-minded American travelers in Europe — with extraordinary depth, and refuses to serve anyone else. The result is a business with margins, loyalty, and competit...

Send us Fan Mail John Mackey built Whole Foods Market from a single health food store in Austin, Texas into the defining premium grocery brand in America — 460 stores, $16 billion in revenue, and a customer loyalty that no conventional retailer could replicate. Then he sold it to Amazon for $13.7 billion. The question isn't whether the price was right. The question is what happens when operat...

Send us Fan Mail Jeff Bewkes ran HBO when it was the most critically acclaimed television network in history — The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex and the City, Deadwood, Six Feet Under. He had every opportunity to grow subscriber base by widening content. He consistently refused. He kept HBO small, premium, and deliberately expensive. Then he dismissed Netflix as "a little startup that was never goi...

Send us Fan Mail Michael Bloomberg was fired from Salomon Brothers in 1981 with a $10 million severance package and an idea: Wall Street traders needed better financial data, and nobody was providing it well. He built a terminal. Not a revolutionary product — a highly practical, data-rich, brutally functional tool that financial professionals adopted. Then he made sure they could never leave. This...

Send us Fan Mail "We're at 72% capacity." That's what the plant manager said. Charts confirmed it. Equipment running, shifts full. Then I spent a week with a stopwatch and discovered they were at 31% true capacity — hiding 132% improvement potential. They almost spent tens of millions on an expansion while wasting more capacity than they were actually using. In this episode, To...

Send us Fan Mail Carnival Corporation owns nine distinct cruise line brands carrying more than 40% of global cruise passengers. The operative question isn't how Micky Arison assembled this portfolio — it's how he kept nine brands from cannibalizing each other while capturing the operational synergies of shared infrastructure. And then there's the Costa Concordia. This is the forensi...

Send us Fan Mail Charif Souki spent ten years, raised billions of dollars, nearly went bankrupt multiple times, and convinced skeptical investors that America would become a liquefied natural gas exporter at a time when conventional wisdom said the US would only ever import LNG. He was right. He built the infrastructure before the market existed. Then Carl Icahn took it from him. This is the foren...

Send us Fan Mail Accenture under Pierre Nanterme made one of the least-discussed and most technically impressive business model transitions in professional services history — converting a management consulting firm into a technology services and digital transformation company without destroying the consulting margin that funded the transition. Most firms that attempt this pivot sacrifice one for t...

Send us Fan Mail In 2014, Target had just suffered one of the largest data breaches in retail history, the catastrophic failure of its Canadian expansion — $2 billion lost, 133 stores closed — and was losing customers to both Amazon and Walmart simultaneously. Brian Cornell arrived with a mandate to fix everything at once. What he chose to focus on first is the operational lesson operators need to...