The Stagnation Assassin Show

Send us Fan Mail DBS Bank in Singapore was known as "Damn Bloody Slow" — a derisive nickname from its own customers. By 2018, Euromoney had named it the world's best digital bank. Same institution. One decade. One CEO. Piyush Gupta's DBS is the definitive answer to the question every regulated industry leader is afraid to ask: can a traditional financial institution become genu...

Send us Fan Mail When Doug Conant arrived at Campbell Soup in 2001, the company had the worst employee engagement scores in the Fortune 500. Not the worst in the food industry — the worst in all of corporate America. Stock had lost more than half its value. The brand was stagnant. The culture was poisoned. What Conant did next — including writing 30,000 handwritten notes to individual employees ov...

Send us Fan Mail The F-35 program is simultaneously one of the most expensive and most criticized defense procurement projects in American history. It has consumed hundreds of billions of dollars and decades of development. It is also, under Marillyn Hewson's stewardship, the case study for what cost reduction in a mature complex systems program actually looks like — not perfect, not cheap, b...

Send us Fan Mail Levi's in 2011 was a brand that everyone recognized and nobody was excited about. The jeans that defined American counterculture in the 1950s had become the denim equivalent of a participation trophy. Chip Bergh walked in, and his first move wasn't a marketing campaign. It was a quality fix. That sequencing — operational before brand — is the lesson operators need today....

Send us Fan Mail In 2009, Barry-Wehmiller faced the financial crisis. Revenue dropped 30% almost overnight. The board and CFO came to Bob Chapman with a recommendation: layoffs. Chapman refused. Instead, he instituted a mandatory furlough — four weeks of unpaid leave, shared equally across every employee, from the CEO to the production floor. Then he ran the numbers to prove it was financially rat...

Send us Fan Mail In 2006, Burberry's iconic check pattern was being worn by British soccer hooligans and counterfeit versions were saturating street markets. A heritage brand that had dressed Winston Churchill had become the uniform of working-class youth subculture. Angela Ahrendts walked in and, over seven years, transformed Burberry back into a legitimate luxury brand without destroying th...

Send us Fan Mail In 2012, every analyst had written off Best Buy. Amazon was eating its lunch. Showrooming — customers using Best Buy stores to test products before buying them cheaper online — was considered the terminal diagnosis for big-box electronics retail. Hubert Joly arrived with a plan that defied every consensus. He turned the showrooming problem into a vendor partnership revenue stream....

Send us Fan Mail Sony in 2012 had lost money for four consecutive years. The company that invented the Walkman, the PlayStation, and Trinitron television had been so thoroughly disrupted by Apple, Samsung, and LG that it had become a case study in how premium consumer electronics brands lose relevance. Kazuo Hirai walked in with a mandate to save a legend. This is the forensic audit of what focus...

Send us Fan Mail May 18th, 2012. The most anticipated IPO in a decade. Facebook goes public at $38 a share, $104 billion valuation, almost no mobile advertising revenue, and a flagship product losing teenagers. Within four months the stock had lost almost half its value. Investors screamed fraud. Analysts screamed bubble. The media wrote Facebook's obituary in real time. Every single one of t...

Send us Fan Mail I asked a leadership team their main competitor's lead time on standard units. Silence. Someone guessed six weeks. It had been four weeks — for eight months. They'd been losing market share to this competitor for years and couldn't answer basic questions about how they operate. That's not competition. That's getting mugged with your eyes closed. In this ep...

Send us Fan Mail July 2002. eBay writes a check for $1.5 billion to acquire PayPal. The PayPal Mafia — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin — walks away with hundreds of millions in cash. Fifteen years later, PayPal is worth over $300 billion as an independent company. Was this the greatest exit in Silicon Valley history, or the greatest giveaway? The answer depends entirely on which...

Send us Fan Mail Picture pitching this to a bank in 1983: we're going to build a store that looks like a warehouse, sell 4,000 products while Walmart sells 100,000, lose money on almost everything we sell, and charge customers just for the privilege of shopping here. You'd be laughed out of the room. Every retail expert in America would call you insane. And yet Costco became one of the m...

Send us Fan Mail In 1991, the two most bitter rivals in computing history walked into a room and shook hands. Apple and IBM — the counterculture rebel and the corporate colossus — decided to build a processor together. It should have been the most powerful partnership in tech history. Instead, it became a textbook case of committee-driven carnage. This one ends in a body bag. Two Giants With Corpo...

Send us Fan Mail It's 2015. Samsung has been slapping screens on wrists for two years. Pebble raised $20 million on Kickstarter. Google launched Android Wear a full year earlier. And Apple shows up late to a party that everyone else started. Every tech pundit called it a copycat move, a desperation play, a Tim Cook vanity project. They were dead wrong. This wasn't a late entrance. This w...

Send us Fan Mail The average fashion brand takes six months to go from design to store shelf. Zara does it in fifteen days. Two weeks. While your favorite designer is still picking fabric swatches, Zara has already designed, manufactured, shipped, and sold the product. This isn't fast fashion. This is Fashion Warfare — and Amancio Ortega became one of the richest humans on Earth by being fast...

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 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, over 8,000 stores worldwide, 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. This is a Corporate Autopsy...

Send us Fan Mail It's 1949. The deserts of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Every major oil company on Earth had passed on the deal. Shell passed. BP passed. The majors laughed off the "Neutral Zone" concession as barren sand with no commercial viability. One man didn't laugh. J. Paul Getty wrote a check for $9.5 million — a fortune at the time — for land that might have nothing undern...

Send us Fan Mail Pan American World Airways invented international travel. It flew presidents and movie stars. Its terminal at JFK was so beautiful it's now a hotel lobby. On December 4th, 1991, Pan Am Flight 436 — the last flight ever — landed in Miami. The crew wept. The passengers wept. The ground crew wept. And then the most famous airline in human history simply ceased to exist. A Fire S...

Send us Fan Mail A company identified 12 significant process improvements during an 18-month product launch — 280 basis points of margin increase, 23% manufacturing cost reduction. How many were implemented? Zero. "We'll address those in phase two after the launch." Phase two never happens. Improvements died in PowerPoint purgatory while the organization continued operating with kno...

Send us Fan Mail In 2007, Netflix was printing $100 million in profit, crushing Blockbuster, and dominating the DVD-by-mail business they invented. Then Reed Hastings launched a streaming service with barely any content, terrible video quality, and limited device support — cannibalizing his own golden goose while every analyst called him crazy. He wasn't crazy. He was a Stagnation Assassin be...

Send us Fan Mail A Chinese competitor entered the market at 40% below our pricing. Leadership spent six months analyzing — market research, competitive teardowns, financial modeling, focus groups, engineering studies. By the time they decided correctly to reposition, they'd lost 30% of retail placement. The decision was brilliant. It was also six months too late — and that's just another...

Send us Fan Mail In 2001, Microsoft — a software company that made its fortune selling Windows and Office to accountants — decided it was going to war against Sony and Nintendo in gaming. An industry where Microsoft had zero credibility, zero existing audience, and zero experience building consumer hardware. The gaming press laughed. Sony smirked. Nintendo shrugged. Four billion dollars in losses...

Send us Fan Mail A 2 a.m. spreadsheet revealed a company's darkest secret: 100 customer-product combinations generated 150% of the profit, while 1,700 combinations destroyed the other 50%. Traditional accounting showed positive gross margins on nearly everything. The P&L was lying — and it's lying to you too. In this episode, Todd Hagopian — the original Stagnation Assassin — introdu...

Send us Fan Mail Mary Kay Ash has just been passed over for a promotion — again — in favor of a man she trained. She quits at 45, recently widowed, with $5,000 in savings. One month later, she launches Mary Kay Cosmetics from a storefront in Dallas, Texas. Within a decade she commands an army of hundreds of thousands of independent saleswomen driving pink Cadillacs. Within two decades, she's...