Customer Reviews

Staples for Success: From Business Plan to Billion-Dollar Business in Just a Decade

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Staple your hands to the table if you are thinking about picking this up for inspiration. Now I know why we created the "New Economy." Mr. Tom Stemberg is old economy: a Harvard MBA with no apparent emotion or personality. After a life in big grocery retail, he read John Naisbitt's MEGATRENDS, which said there will be more home businesses in the 80s and 90s, and had the great idea about Staples. At first he could't get it funded by venture capital. Then, he did get it funded with a ton of VC, and the VC that passed on him funded the clone competition (OfficeMax, OfficeDepot, OfficeOrifice.com).

Here's the moment when I made up my mind about this book: Stemberg says words to the effect of, "Of course, there's very little you can do to get jazzed about selling paper clips." His job was to move as much product as possible.

Stemberg shows a lack of understanding of the new codes of business: where believing in what you and your people are doing comes first. You must understand the effect your business is having on a changing society, and understand where society is going.

One last jibe— the book is like triple spaced, so it's quite a page-turner. It's badly designed, with pull quotes from the text appearing in big type 3 or 4 pages before they appear in the main body. So the main points contain few surprises. And you can tell it was probably ghost-written by Stemberg's flunkies somewhere, the writing is corporate-smoothe clockwork and has absolutely no soul.

Still, I enjoyed this, for it shows us new economy punks what we are NOT....