...Amazon and Borders book history and the core business of each company will be discussed with a look at the comparison of the companies view point on management approach to Internet marketing and sales. You will read reasons for Amazon’s success and Borders demise. The emphasis will be on each company’s adaptability to the markets changing conditions and recommendations a company should build in flexibility to back decisions to adapt to these market changes. Let us start with a timeline of Borders Books which was founded in 1971 by Tom and Louis Borders. Two brothers opened an 800-square-foot used bookstore and called it Borders Book Shop located at 211 S. South State St. in Ann Arbor Michigan. Borders had eight CEO’s over its 40 years. Starting in 1988 when Borders recruits Robert DiRomualdo to lead the company's expansion. DiRomualdo is later credited with leading the company's rise to national prominence in the 1990s. The highest point of Borders was in the 1990’s under DiRomualdo’s leadership as CEO, the company started integrating music and movies into some of its stores. In 1992 Borders chooses not to go public but rather to allow Kmart Corporation acquire them and in 1995 the book store chain, renamed Borders Group Inc., spins off from Kmart and goes public on the New York Stock Exchange. At the time, Borders' innovative inventory management system was considered "the envy of the industry". The 1990’s Borders adds 52 superstores in the biggest one-year expansion in its...
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...Begin Reading Table of Contents Photos Newsletters Copyright Page In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. For Isabella and Calista Stone When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. —Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, May 30, 2010 Prologue In the early 1970s, an industrious advertising executive named Julie Ray became fascinated with an unconventional public-school program for gifted children in Houston, Texas. Her son was among the first students enrolled in what would later be called the Vanguard program, which stoked creativity and independence in its students and nurtured expansive, outside-the-box thinking. Ray grew so enamored with the curriculum and the community of enthusiastic teachers and parents that she set out to research similar schools around the state with an eye toward writing a book about...
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