Word: sargent
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...retail, the general rule has always been, the more customers, the better. But these days certain companies, like Staples and Best Buy, are concluding that when it comes to profitability, less may actually be more. TIME staff writer DANIEL EISENBERG talked with Staples CEO Ronald Sargent about how this bold marketing approach, among others, is helping the office-supply superstore giant pull away from the pack...
...RONALD SARGENT: I think there is still lots of opportunity in this business. The top three--Office Depot, OfficeMax and us--only have about 20% of the U.S. market. Still, during the dotcom era, investors thought we were growing too fast, and I think Wall Street wanted to figure out who was going to win in this industry. The question for us was, How does a fast-growth company grow up from adolescence to become a little more of a mature company...
...SARGENT: We started with customers and said, "What's important to you?" They told us we weren't terribly differentiated. OfficeMax, Office Depot, Staples--all the same thing, same products, same prices, same service. We heard loud and clear that we had drifted more toward a casual consumer approach rather than our core, which was small business. We heard that our service was just O.K. and that maybe price wasn't as important as it used...
...those of us who belong to the university, those who do not are essentially banished from paradise. Travelers visiting Harvard are stopped at the main entrance—at most, they illicitly take photographs before being chased away by the library staff. The stacks, the reading rooms, the Sargent frescos and even the uncannily silent Harry Widener memorial are all out of their reach. What is worse, even many members of our clerical staff are excluded from using the libraries. Yet decisions about how to present such a central part of the university speak eloquently about how we relate...
...find (Cartier, Chanel, Louis Vuitton), his shops will offer an array of his own private-label products. Also on display in a gallery will be selected works from the world-class art collection that was prominently featured at the Bellagio. (Wynn recently paid $8.8 million for a John Singer Sargent portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson.) While rival executives tend to mock his Renaissance-man profile, what really rankles them is his aggressive show-stealing tendencies. As Wynn's friend and fellow developer Irwin Molasky says, "Everyone is spending time anticipating and reacting to his next move." They are finding that...