I really enjoyed how this article was written. I'm going to classify this as a "just do a good job." We people like to understand the world with stories. Plot

I really enjoyed how this article was written. I'm going to classify this as a "just do a good job." We people like to understand the world with stories. Plot points. Twists. Heroes, antiheroes, antagonists... That's a bias. All of the failed B&N strategies were snappy headlines... good stories: Online sales, digital sales & ereader, bookstore cafes, restaurant business... These are all strategies you can put on a slide and sell to a board or executive team. An investment blogger can summarize them in a tweet. People can easily form opinions about them. You either think it's a good idea, or a bad one... and expect success or failure to follow smoothly from the goodness of the decision. IRL though, execution matters. Almost every war ever fought was determined in battlefields, not palaces. That's true for Russia in Ukraine, the US in Afghanistan... and we'll shortly forget this lesson about both. From the outside, it's always easier to credit political-level decisions and forget about execution. I think this is a major recurring fallacy. Real outcomes are not deterministic. They're usually determined by execution. Ted Gioia does a great job of creating a narrative frame here. But, it sounds like successes actually came from sub-narrative decisions. How purchasing is managed. Pricing & promotion policies. Responsibility splits between HQ & stores. These are all mundane, "housekeeping" issues... execution details. Strategic decisions obviously matter. They're also interesting, especially to low engagement outsiders... including shareholders. They do not matter nearly as much as tactics. Tactics > Strategy, in life as in chess. This is the kind of thing that gets lost in 2nd hand accounts.