Sears: Failing Company with Ayn Rand Mentality CEO - Free Market Thinking killed a thriving Company

...what happens when Ayn Rand is the basis for your business plan.
Crazy Eddie has been one of America’s most vocal advocates of discredited free-market economics, so obsessed with Ayn Rand he could rattle off memorized passages of her novels. As Mina Kimes explained in a fascinating profile in Bloomberg Businessweek, Lampert took the myth that humans perform best when acting selfishly as gospel, pitting Sears company managers against each other in a kind of Lord of the Flies death match. This, he believed, would cause them to act rationally and boost performance.
If you think that sounds batshit crazy, congratulations. You understand more than most of America’s business school graduates.
Instead of enhancing Sears’ bottom line, the heads of various divisions began to undermine each other and fight tooth and claw for the profits of their individual fiefdoms at the expense of the overall brand. By this time Crazy Eddie was completely in thrall to his own bloated ego, and fancied he could bend underlings to his will by putting them through humiliating rituals, like annual conference calls in which unit managers were forced to bow and scrape for money and resources. But the chaos only grew.


http://www.alternet.org/economy/eddie-lampert-and-ayn-rand?akid=11254.294211.YfSboP&rd=1&src=newsletter934586&t=9