Shrinking Sinking Sears
	In 1972, Sears was the world's largest retail business. Sears had been started by an alert and confident Richard Sears who, while working as a train conductor in the later 19th century, purchased an unclaimed consignment of watches for $75. He sold all of those watches and Sears Roebuck & Co. was born.
Sears flourished over the next decades guided by wise merchandising minds that empowered good managers and implemented innovative marketing techniques.
Sears is a metaphor for the United States of America. A victim during the later third of the 20th century, Sears undermined itself through arrogance and inept management. It allowed the women's movement, affirmative action, equal opportunity hiring mandates, and a pandering board of directors to misguide management and demoralize key staff. The changing world provided opportunities which Sears ignored. It is too late for Sears to catch up.
Sears collapsed from within by not reacting with fortitude against damaging cultural and governmental regulatory forces. Once the world's largest retailer, Sears declined and today Sears flails in search of a retail niche while actually existing as a financial tool and real estate play.
Serious decay began when Sears was near its peak. It had just opened the Sears Tower. It had plans to build a second Sears Tower directly across the street on Franklin in about the year 2000.
Arrogance, gains too easily gotten, a lack of analysis, and no perceived need to improve, conspired against top management. This resulted in weak upper management making inept decisions under misguided pressures.
Sears' Peak:
In 1973 Sears was one of the 30 Dow Jones Industrial stocks, the world's largest retailer, and major competition for its two biggest rivals, J. C. Penny and KMart. Sears had two classes of employees. Of its 360,000 workers, approximately 4,000 were classified as "Checklist". All other employees were "timecard". The Checklist category included executives and those in departments working in career-oriented positions that could lead to upper management positions over a lengthy career.
Sears' Mandate:
In 1974 the US was being split apart culturally. The Vietnam War, racial inequalities, a stagnant stock market, and high inflation were each contributing to disarray. The Watergate scandal further frustrated, polarized and angered people who felt they had been lied to and trusted an untrustworthy man recently reelected president by a wide margin.
Weak leadership had taken reign nationally and Sears followed by electing a touchy-feely, career employee named Dean Swift as president. Looking back it appears his grandest accomplishment was that he did what he promised to do. Upon being given control of Sears, he traveled across the country and actually did shake hands with every Checklist employee.
At this same period, the US Congress passed legislation known as the Equal Opportunity Employment Act. This broad legislation mandated that hiring must not include discrimination based upon race, religion, or ethnicity. Congress forgot to mandate that hiring may still include decisions based upon education, skills, and experience which demonstrate potential success on the job.
However, Congress did realize that it needed to do more than simply pass legislation. It needed to mandate -- meaning here, pass responsibility for successful implementation of its laws upon corporate America.
Sears was a highly visible tower and a surrogate for all of corporate America. Congress mandated through Sears board of directors that Sears should be a perfect example of Equal Opportunity Employment hiring practices. The pressure was put on Sears directors and they succumbed.
Sears directors ordered upper management to implement a plan fast tracking minorities and female employees into all levels of staff and management.
Sears called all Checklist employees into meetings over several weeks to define the problem and identify its solution.
Sears midlevel management presented -- often on a stage -- an easel with a magnetic outline map of the USA. Upon this map were pinpointed New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. The presenter said employees working on their jobs are in a race that is analogous to a car race across the country form East to West.
The presenter then held two small magnetic cars. One car was black. One car was white. He then placed the white car somewhere in the area of Iowa. The black car was placed on the map in Philadelphia. The presenter said that there had been an ongoing race in America and Sears wherein the white car was far ahead of the black car. The black was only in Philly while the white car had reached far out into the Midwest.
This, according to the corporate presenter, was -- for some unidentified reason -- not fair. He continued by stating that Sears' Board of Directors, being patriotic and, mandated by the US Congress, was going to change that unfair situation. Sears was going to give the black car extras.
Sears plan to make things fair stated that it would from this instant on: 1.) Aggressively hire and promote minorities; 2.) Aggressively hire and promote females; 3.) Aggressively refrain from hiring and promoting white males.
Sears' Result:
Following that presentation, women and minorities were hired and promoted aggressively. White males were passed over with abandon and with no excuses. Even in technical areas such as computer programming, competence and high skill levels meant little for the careers of white males. Many found themselves working for unprepared women. Many found themselves having to do extra work to make up for inabilities and laziness of many minority workers who were not able to understand or capable of being concerned with tasks such as programming, system design, and meeting deadlines.
In fact, Sears computer training program which had been developed in 1968 and was one of a few corporate training grounds in America, found its curriculum greatly simplified to accommodate newly hired minorities and females. In 1972, the computer training program was three months long. New hires could graduate in less than three months, but no more than three months. Graduation meant assignment into one of the many corporate system development projects.
Within a year of the Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employment plan's implementation, the training program was simplified. Elements and aspects were removed. Graduation was no longer required to come within three months. Graduation could be postponed and deferred for up to nine months -- in the new simplified training program. At the end of nine months, many graduates were reassigned to one of several more simple corporate development projects.
The result was that some who had been unable to graduate from the training program within the nine months, just started calling in sick and collecting sick-pay. Eventually some of those employees were no longer paid in absentia and were not heard from again.
More insidiously, many who had been unable to graduate in nine months showed up for work but failed to do any work. That meant additional tasks had to be done and redone by the white males who were on those project teams populated by Affirmative Action hires. Those were the same white males who were being passed over for raises and promotions. Many white males -- those having the most potential to guide Sears through the coming Wal-Mart era -- left after 1974.
It made no sense for them to stay at Sears only to be passed over for promotions and raises. At Sears, their work ethic demanded that they then do the work not done by others who were being paid but cared little. But most egregiously, there was no reason why the best employees should be made to serve the whims of inept managers who had been prematurely promoted to positions they would never be capable of filling adequately. Sears' remaining employees were left in charge. Today it is evident how well they performed. Simply evaluate what Sears became post-1974.
Sears, A Metaphor For America:
The decline of American retailers J. C. Penny, KMart and Sears is not a decline in retailing. It is the decline of these once great business operations built by smart and stern managements. Their mistake was allowing weak management to be overrun by government regulation, lowering hiring standards, promoting the less-qualified and the unfit. The new hires were unable to adapt to the new retail environment established by Wal-Mart.
We are not all entitled to be handed the boss's job just because we are kind, pretty, and certainly not because we wear a specific skin color or are of a specific gender.
We only deserve promotion if we demonstrate skills and work ethic above and beyond our coworkers. And those coworkers who fail to meet reasonable work performance standards actually do deserve to be fired. Maybe after being fired they will select a career path where they may excel through hard work and perseverance.