How to bring a business back to life (w/ Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt)(Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Anne Morriss: You are listening to Fixable, a podcast brought to you by TED. It's hosted by me, Anne Morriss.

Frances Frei: And me, Frances Frei. 

Anne Morriss: Frances and I are professional fixers, so companies call us in when they need help solving workplace problems fast. If you're a longtime listener, you know we're deeply committed to this goal, and we love it when we get to spotlight companies who are getting it right. 

Frances Frei: And the thing we love about the spotlight is when we get to show you the ones that really shouldn't have been able to turn it around, and against all odds, they still can do it. Because it gives all kinds of ahas on how we can go do it ourselves.

Anne Morriss: A hundred percent. And Frances, you are in luck because today we're delighted to host James Daunt on the show to discuss the incredible work he's done as CEO at Barnes and Noble. He is the driving force behind the company's revival. It's, it's really a resurrection, which is set to open 60 new stores this year.

Frances Frei: I can scarcely believe you just said that sentence, that Barnes and Noble, which I wasn't sure, if you had asked me, I'm not sure I'd pass the test. Is it still around? Because the last I, it was on the last gasp. It was on its last gasp and now it's opening 60 new stores. This I hope is chockfull of operational detail. I can't wait to learn how the heck he's done it. 

Anne Morriss: In a world of Amazon ascendant, the probability that this company was gonna find its footing was quite low, and yet it hasn't just found its footing, this organization is dancing down a street near you. So let's bring James in and learn all about it.

James Daunt, welcome to Fixable. 

James Daunt: Thank you for having me. 

Anne Morriss: We're truly excited to have you on the show. We've been admiring your success from a distance. We wrote about you in our last book, and here you are. We couldn't be more thrilled. 

James Daunt: Thank you. Slightly embarrassed, but. 

Anne Morriss: That's how we like to start all our interviews, by embarrassing our guests.

Yeah. I'd love to start with your personal story. You started out as an investment banker. Talk to us about the road from banking to independent bookstores, which is not an obvious path. 

James Daunt: I'm ashamed to say you just turned up at a career service at your college and they said, so here are all the jobs you can do. And then in my case, chose an American bank simply because I wanted to come to New York. And that sounded more fun than being in London. 

Anne Morriss: It's a great race down the path. Yeah. 

James Daunt: And I did it for not very long. I greatly enjoyed it. I was the ripe old age of 24, uh, when I left, without any idea at all to what to do, and I thought it had to be something very close to my core interests, reading and traveling.

And I opted for the reading part and opened a book shop just as the first Gulf War started and the economy went rather badly immediately. I do know what it's like when, when you are, your back is against the wall and, and that sort of sense of, I suppose caution, is a helpful one for anybody in business to understand.

Anne Morriss: Absolutely. So then if I'm following your story correctly, you got pulled into the turnaround of Waterstones, which was a not so independent bookstore chain. Was that the next plot point? 

James Daunt: Yes. There was a sort of a long period in between when I just was a shopkeeper and I attended my bookstore and actually we did extremely well or increasingly well, and I opened new shops and got to a point when the big chains were in trouble and consolidating, a lot of independent bookstores closing as well. Generally the industry not having a nice time at all. I was having a perfectly nice time. 

Anne Morriss: What were you doing differently even at that point? 

James Daunt: I was just running a really good bookstore and people liked it and my customers liked it. And for very simple reasons. I took great care with the books that I chose to display and sell, and I had very nice people working for me, and that created an environment that people wanted to come to. And we had increased sales literally every single month for 21 years. 

Frances Frei: I've, I've never heard, I've just, I've never heard another company make that claim. 

James Daunt: And we've kept it going and still keep it going other than during Covid. I think if you stick to your knitting and have an expectation of excellence and you're a retailer and you're lucky enough to be in a central London location where people can find you... meanwhile, in the world of books, uh, all was not going well. The guys in Seattle had obviously set up shop and were doing rather well, and Amazon just ate everybody's lunch, particularly the big chains. And Waterstones, which was the sole survivor by the, by 2011, was itself then effectively a bankrupt business. And I was very keen that it didn't close. I felt that it could be saved if it returned to the core principles of good book selling and failed to find anybody to back me with it for a very long time until I chanced upon, serendipitously, a Russian businessman who was prepared to put up the money. 

Anne Morriss: So then you become captivated by the challenge of turning around this other brand, Waterstones. And why make the leap? Was it the challenge? Was it the opportunity to learn? 

James Daunt: I think a combination of things. Um, I do feel quite vocationally motivated. I am a vocational bookseller. I love the trade and I love the fact that bookshops, they're not remotely as important as libraries, but they are nonetheless important. And in particular, having bookstores in more deprived locations and less advantageous communities. They're really rather wonderful. And if the circumstance, and unfortunate circumstance is, it all becomes concentrated in a single large business, the closure of that is going to have quite long-term ramifications in those places.

It won't in the smart places and the leafy middle class, the university towns, and they will have, their independents that will gradually replace the big guys and that will be fine. But in the wider world, that simply isn't going to be the case. It's miraculous that they exist, be it Waterstones in the UK or Barnes and Noble in the United States.

It's a miracle. But if they go, they're never coming back. And I thought that was just a real shame and so totally unnecessary, and therefore I felt I could do something about it. So I would. 

Anne Morriss: We're gonna get to Barnes and Noble in a minute, but what did the experience at Waterstones teach you? 

James Daunt: It's a little difficult, in fact, to turn around bigger businesses. You have to be extremely patient and go at the pace that everybody can understand and adapt to. But if you just keep at it and remain patient, you can change cultures. And ultimately, if you trust people and let people get on with, in our case, running decent bookshops, it'll come good. It won't be linear, but you will be fine in the end. 

Anne Morriss: You started to make some unconventional choices at Waterstones, and this was a theme that you continued in your leadership of Barnes and Noble. What gave you the courage to start breaking the rules and what did you learn from that? 

James Daunt: People are listening to this, they can't see my eyebrows shooting up at the idea that I'm unconventional or break rules. I endeavor to follow the simple mantra that if you allow the team in a bookshop to run the bookshop, they will be, run it perfectly sensibly, allow common sense to, to rule. And while some of them will make it a lot worse, most of them will make it better. And ultimately, if you can get the good people to talk to the not so good people, it'll all come good. Within that, there are just then occasionally a few decisions that you have to make, and the obvious thing if you're running something is just make decisions. In my case, I'm very happy to change my mind also quite frequently and try never to look in the rear view mirror. If I make a mistake, I change my mind as quickly as I possibly can, pretend I never made the mistake and go in a better direction. 

Anne Morriss: I love it. Take us back to Waterstones. What's one example of something that you did differently from the other big retailers.

James Daunt: One of the things is that we do genuinely let the shops run themselves.

Most people when they talk about this sort of say and articulate, let the manager do that, and you will hopefully never hear me say that, and you'll always hear me say, let the team do that. 

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm. 

James Daunt: And I think it is putting a structure in that as far as possible, eliminates hierarchy or at least supports hierarchy.

And yes, of course you need a shop manager, store manager, but you wanna put a team around them and you want to make the role of that manager as easy as it possibly can be, because otherwise, it's an intolerable and unrealistic expectation that a single individual will cover all of the skill sets that you need within even a relatively small enterprise that a single bookshop is, to allow that to flourish. We play a game called Rugby Union in the UK, and it's very unlike any of the American sports because, maybe a little bit like American football, but not altogether. You have every size of human present on that field. It's a team of 15, and there's a position for everybody. There's one for little five foot people who can run and be nimble. There are positions for great six foot nine hulking monsters. There are skinny fast people. There is a role for every type of person. The totally uncoordinated individual who can just shove has a role. The really coordinated person who can do extraordinary things, kicking and with hand eye coordination of the gods. They have their role in. But none of them work independently. And that's what putting together a bookstore team is. You need all of the skill sets. Whereas traditionally, I think we've always thought that you need excellence in every role. That there is this perfect person, then everybody needs to be some, as far as possible, idenitcate of that. And I simply don't believe that. And once one can embrace all these different sets of skills, you can create much more effective teams and much more supportive ones. 

Frances Frei: We often hear the metaphor of we're hiring for the best athlete, and that would go completely against what you just said.

James Daunt: Completely against, yeah.

Anne Morriss: Let's get into the Barnes and Noble story. By the time you got there, the world was really starting to give up on this whole category. Amazon's muscling in, there's this ebook phenomenon. Just the E-commerce in general is captivating everybody's imagination, but you very much saw a place for real stores attracting real people who are gonna read real books.

Why do you think you were able to see that opportunity at a time when everyone else was looking somewhere else?

James Daunt: I think simply because I was running a very good book store and knew, and could evidently see it, every single day, that a nice bookshop is a pure pleasure to people. And knowing that's also true in almost every single community where one is lucky enough to be able to have a bookshop.

Yes, of course, at times of great economic stress, perhaps in the most deprived environments, there will be more pressure than in, in affluent ones, but beyond that, people will still be coming into the store and enjoying the store. And by the time I got to the US I'd obviously had the UK experience at Waterstones, where in particular we didn't close any of our stores in, in deprived environments where everybody else did.

I mean, I still have bookshops up and down the United Kingdom in High Street locations where every single other mainstream retailer has left. Banks have gone, all the food people are gone, the pharmacies are gone. Everybody's gone. Let alone all the clothing people. They were once there, but now they've gone. And we kept our bookshops open and the bookshops have actually continued to do really well.

They're absolutely central to those communities. And I know that there is a thirst for it, but you need a real focus on the quality of the shop, commitment from the team within it, for that to work. 

Anne Morriss: You show up at Barnes and Noble, what year is it? 

James Daunt: September, 2019. So, which is a terrible time if you're a retailer like us, because you've got the holiday that just hits you straight away.

All you do is turn up and try and get to December the 24th and then through the sale period. So that's what I did. I did thankfully do a few other quick things, and then we were shut down by Covid. So the timing was not great. 

Anne Morriss: So, uh, a lot of retails did not make it through the pandemic, and you used it as an opportunity to go back to the drawing board, redesign stores, figure out how to work in the context of what was truly a surreal moment, personally, economically.

Talk us through the decisions you made in that moment to lay a foundation for your success here.

James Daunt: I was fortunate to have an owner who was prepared to back the business, and that's not a given, but I did. And my hypothesis was that, frankly was that if we never opened up and this thing, and of course at that point we didn't know, by keeping the sort of, the core book selling teams employed and getting to work on the stores. If we ended up never opening again, a little bit more money would've been lost. But if it was such a catastrophe anyway, perhaps in the fullness of time, we could be forgiven for this sort of little extra. But if in fact the world opened up again, at least use this moment to really improve our stores so that when we do open, we've got something much, much better. And a reasonably obvious bet that if people have been locked up in their homes, they would be getting stir crazy and when they came out, if you had better stores, they're probably gonna be really fed up with people quite quickly. And we might therefore spur a rebound in the business much more effectively than otherwise.

And that's what we did. And we kept the lights on in the stores. Everybody turned up to work. They moved the stores around, they went through their stock. In the US it turned out to actually be a relatively short period that we were closed. A bit longer on the East Coast, a bit longer on the West Coast, in the middle some time, some places, not at all. But we got to work, and by the time we did reopen, the teams had, had rearranged their stores. And I think most importantly, we still employed them. We still had them, so we didn't have that difficulty that I think a lot of people did, which was just rebuilding their labor force.

Ours hadn't gone away, so we were okay. 

Anne Morriss: How did you rearrange the stores? And to what end? 

James Daunt: The intention was to move from what were these very linearly arranged bookstores that those of you who went to a, a Barnes and Noble pre then would've, would understand. And those are not something that looked very like a library.

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm, I remember.

James Daunt: The bookstore up until that point, and this is, they were obviously designed in a pre-Amazon age, was predicated on the basis that customers would come into the bookstore and say, do you have this book? A nice book seller would say, yes, follow me, and you'd find the book and they'd take the money off them and they'd leave.

They were places to find the book that you wanted, that you knew that you wanted. They were a physical Amazon as it were. Obviously, Amazon replaced that altogether and much more effectively and efficiently, and we needed bookstores that people wanted to spend time in. So we created what we call rooms. So you organize the furniture into sort of squares and Hs and all of these shapes, which allowed us to create different sized rooms, so full of books, and then you could put your history in one room and your biography in another, and your romance in a third and so on. Which makes browsing much more enjoyable and also puts, allows customers to navigate the shops in a more intuitive way and different customer groups can enjoy themselves.

We had a huge success creating, for example, new manga rooms. Manga was not something that we had done before. And we put in, we made a big bet on that, that manga was going to be the particular thing that people wanted as they came out of Covid, and... people, boys. 

Anne Morriss: Uh huh, we have one of those boys. 

James Daunt: And in they came and we also bought all the manga stock that there was, just about. So if you wanted manga, you had to come to Barnes and Noble. So we were doing things like that, and it created just much more fun stores. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah.

When you look back at the decisions that were most important in your success, what else is on the list? 

James Daunt: I think keeping some reasonably simple principles, trying to be nice. I use the word nice a lot. 

Anne Morriss: To each other, to customers? 

James Daunt: Yeah, just to each other and to customers. And create a nice working environment in which people are nice to each other and, and be respectful and pleasant, and that's not always easy. It's definitely not easy for a retailer, which is a very operationally driven business. A retail is a tough trade and most retail, including then Barnes and Noble was predicated on the necessity to get your store open at 9:00 AM and closed at 9:00 PM and in between with absolute rigor, ensure consistency from one store to the next.

That requires immense operational exactitude and proficiency. And what it doesn't encourage is niceness. 

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm. Historically, it hadn't encouraged a lot of local decision making, and that's a tension that you have beautifully navigated. How did you resolve that? 

James Daunt: Hopefully beautifully, better in the process of navigating rather than navigated.

 This is a slow process, and one of the problems also is the nature and structure of retail, which is a chronically and inherently low margin, low profit business. The cost is on everybody's mind all the time. And the employment model will tend to be a very small number of full-time employees on reasonable salaries, and then the vast majority of people part-time and on the lowest possible wage that there can be, which is the retail wage, and then you don't have to pay anybody benefits and your costs are as low as possible. That, of course, makes retention and the accumulation of knowledge extremely difficult. So we've had to work through a completely new organizational structure in which you put in career paths and ladders and very overtly and explicitly say we're gonna be employing far fewer people in order to pay them much more. But in so doing, have much greater efficiency and productivity to use the operator's words, but hopefully have people who enjoy the job and are committed to the job and are vocational around it. And when you've got those people in place, you can then start being much more sophisticated about what you are able to do within the store 'cause you've got much better people. 

Frances Frei: When you have fewer, better people, can you give us one illustrative example of something that used to take a lot and then it, you could do it with fewer because they were these more committed folks? 

James Daunt: One, you have to have far fewer people in your head office because you're no longer directing and instructing and giving all the planograms and so on, and, and the first thing I did was reduce the number of people that we employed in our home office.

The key advantage was that was before March, I was able to close both of our offices in the city, which were otherwise hugely expensive to rent, let alone to staff. Uh, you need far fewer people within the stores themselves. We let them run their own stock. Now they decide what to sell, where to put it, even what price to put on it.

And one of the advantages of that is you manage inventory dramatically more effectively. If you manage inventory, a lot of the tasks that the labor attached to inventory drops away because there's less of it. As a bookseller, you can send books back, what we call return books to publishers, which you don't sell.

That was roughly about 70% of new books that came in as new books went back as returns. Overall, about 25% of everything that came in through the front door went back out as returns. That's now down to about 8%, and it all has been running at 3, 4% now for many years. Just the mathematics of having 20% less come in and then that 20% go back is roughly half your labor disappears that's attached to inventory. It's much more difficult to get things back out and running in two different directions than just in one direction. 

Anne Morriss: James, when did you know your strategy was working? 

James Daunt: I managed to take over at Waterstones, which was in, in an absolute crash of unwinding awfulness as it went down to towards bankruptcy. Quite soon after, just as I began to think, I, I know what I've gotta do here and I'm making all these steps, that friendly Mr. Bezos sat in Seattle launched the Kindle Paperwhite. And every headline was that no one was ever gonna read a physical book again, and Kindle and eBooks were the only way.

So I think I had a little brief moment of that, that everything was gonna be okay, and then the rain clouds descended and it took me probably about four or five years to dig Waterstones out of that hole. And we did. So I think that's where the experience of my early years at Daunt Books was helpful, which is you just have to be very patient and very stubborn and work your way through it and wait. I did know that good bookshops will be popular and successful and I always had, as I do at Barnes and Noble, and I always had at Waterstones, which is a few fabulous booksellers running fabulous stores. 

Frances Frei: Mm. 

James Daunt: They were so self evidently doing well. It was merely a question of getting the others to be like them.

Anne Morriss: I am just imagining myself in the situation, seeing you walk through the door, not telling me you've got everything figured out, but bringing other things into the room that are energizing. This can-do energy, creativity, knowledge of the industry. What was that like and what advice do you have for other people in similar situations?

James Daunt: Everybody does it each under their own way. I may not sound like it, but I'm deeply introverted personally, but I know that there are these amazing inspirational leaders who are on a soapbox leading the troops from the front. I'm somebody who probably just shuffles around behind, but does try to sort of quietly encourage people and know that if you give people support and allow them to do their best, generally they will do amazing things for you. And I think we've done also sensible things to make working for us as as pleasant as possible. We are very unhierarchical, which I think is very helpful. We're in an industry which has traditionally been run by men, and that's very peculiar when most of our employees are, certainly at the early stages, are, are women.

How do you make an yourself a very good employer of women? You better put your maternity policies in place and put flexibility at the core of everything that you do, and again, create a gentle environment that will produce a workplace, which isn't for everybody, but which is for some, and you then are able to create a team, which is, in my case, at Waterstones then was very young and still is to my mind, extremely young, but very tight knit and, and very effective.

And I'm in the process of doing the same at Barnes and Noble. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, and I just wanna dwell on this for a minute because here in, in America we do have this idea of the turnaround leader as this very extroverted, strong bias for action. Follow me energy. You have been wildly successful on a different emotional frequency than that.

James Daunt: Yes. I'm the one in the meeting who is quietly in the back. And, and, and what I try and encourage is that people think through what they're doing. And I, I'm also actually quite a believer in writing things down. Maybe as a book seller, that's a sort of a sensible enough thing to do, but when you write them down, it does force you to confront them. Is that actually what we mean? Write things concisely. You can talk your way into something which sounds fantastic and fabulous and sensible and all the rest when it isn't at all. It's just a very articulate and perhaps inspirational string of words. 

Anne Morriss: Just for the absence of doubt, when you say write things down, are you writing things down for yourself? Are you asking for your team members to write things down and make their case on paper? Where does writing show up in, in your management practice? 

James Daunt: I think when you are trying to do something, not as an essay, not as a PowerPoint, not as a, but just as either, depending on your skill at writing, either just putting down bullet points, this is what I mean by this initiative or that initiative, or this idea or that idea is as short and concise as possible.

One of the differences in America, people write at very great length in their emails. Huge. I get emails from lots of booksellers. 

Anne Morriss: Paragraphs.

James Daunt: No, novellas. Often in the process being highly contradictory in what's in them. And so what I'm asking for is just single pages. Can we just have a quick little bullet point of actually what we're trying to do here?

And I think the value in that is forcing a reflection upon what actually do we mean here? 

Frances Frei: This is where Blaze Pascal, who famously got us to say, I apologize for writing the long letter. I didn't have time to write the short letter. I suspect that your single page is a lot harder to write. 

James Daunt: Much harder, much harder.

Anne Morriss: Um, in an interview on CNBC, you talked about not seeing Amazon as a competitor anymore, I'm tacking on the anymore, but as a force that's actually benefited the company. So tell us how that has worked, because the world still loves to tell a story of Amazon as a destroyer of businesses, but you've experienced something different.

James Daunt: No, I definitely think Amazon is a destroyer of businesses. But partially because businesses were unable to adapt or justify their position in a world in which Amazon could be so extraordinarily efficient and proficient. In my case, I've always thought of them as, anybody who sells books can't be that bad, and I have always been most respectful of all of libraries, and those guys give away books for free and we just walk in there. I mean, at least Mr. Bezos makes you pay for them. So I always felt that they were, probably gonna help book ownership, expand book ownership, which I do think has happened. They are fabulous in selling all the boring books, so we don't have to have them in our bookstores. 'Cause we used to. Even I had to have just the most tedious books on my shelves imaginable because people kept on coming in and asking for them. 

Anne Morriss: What's an example of a tedious book? 

James Daunt: Perfectly virtuous ones. You know, how to, you know, wire electrical appliances, you know, the, we, there are endless books of that sort.

Books about careers. I mean, I personally don't sell in my own books stores. I don't sell any business books. I find it... 

Anne Morriss: Trust me, we write them. They're very tedious, James. 

Frances Frei: Oh, we unapologetically have "how to" in our titles. I, I assure you they belong on Amazon. 

Anne Morriss: Oh no. We write self-help books for sure. 

James Daunt: I was thinking more of this, you know, how to do your accounting, how to fill in your tax return, how to do all of those, you know, just manuals.

They're not books books. 

Anne Morriss: Right. And now Amazon can do that work for you. 

James Daunt: They can do all that work for you. And they popularize books and clearly life is a little bit more difficult when they're around. You better be on your game, otherwise you're in trouble, but it's not a bad thing. And certainly the popularizing of book ownership is fantastically helpful. And I also don't particularly mind whether people, how people read if they want to listen to books. But that won't change my role in selling physical books 'cause that's what I do. And I think the more people who are engaged with books and ideas and thoughts and the rest, the more people ultimately I'm gonna have in my store.

Anne Morriss: Let's talk about another wild card here, which is BookTok. So BookTok, for listeners who, who may not know the, the handful of you out there, it's the section of TikTok where users share their favorite books. Exposure on BookTok has catapulted authors onto the bestsellers list. It's credited with drawing young people into bookstores like yours.

Talk to me about the role of BookTok at Barnes and Noble today. How has it changed the business? 

James Daunt: I don't think BookToks changed the business at all. Other than that forever, and as I say, I'm a, whatever it is, 35 year book store veteran now, books and the talking around books, particularly amongst young adults, has been a constant part of that time period. And just in its most obvious example, in Harry Potter and the huge success and, but Harry Potter's just the biggest of them. Every few months, often every month, another book rolls through and it has done for 35 years. How the kids have learned about this has changed. And Snapchat was doing it for a bit, and you can go through the sort of the litany of social media, but before social media, I think they were probably borrowing their parents' telephones. The kids love talking about books and they love collecting things and they love being on the trend. Now, it just happens that BookTok is just utterly brilliant at it, and so it's whipped up another wave of enthusiasm around books, but it doesn't feel new to me. It feels entirely old fashioned, actually. We've got people queuing up at midnight two days ago for the Suzanne Collins, and we sold a hundred thousand copies. But we were doing that, you know, I was doing that in my stores back in the, in, in the nineties. It's now BookTok is just another brilliant way of doing it. 

Anne Morriss: Right. 

James Daunt: I have no idea how it works and I've never looked at it. I just know that everyone tells me that's how the kids are doing it, but they've always done it one way or the other. 

Anne Morriss: Where is this industry going, do you think? And what, what's gonna be Barnes and Noble's role going forward? 

James Daunt: Well, I think the publishing industry seems to continue to go from strength to strength and on the back of greater engagement books.

And we know we are, might feel at times that isn't the case, but generally as a society we're becoming better educated and slightly more affluent. And more and more people are reading and engaging with books. Certainly there's a huge continuing aspirational aspect for every class of family. You want your kids to be better educated and have better life chances, and getting them to read will help with that.

So I think publishers will continue to benefit from this growing market, whether we as booksellers can continue to be central to the discovery of books and the enjoyment of books, I would hope so. If we're good at our role, then that's the case. I hope that libraries continue to be supported. They're definitely under huge pressure in the United Kingdom. Financial pressure, different sorts of pressures here in the US, but again, these are probably deep roots within their communities, which will ultimately enable them to prevail even if the respective governments are unable to do so. I think books are probably in a very good place, and I think as, as long as we stay true to our principles, which I know everybody working for us will endeavor to do, I think we've got a very good future.

Anne Morriss: Do you think of it as enabling the discovery of books? How do you think about the role that you're playing in that world? Or a spirit of play? 

James Daunt: There's a real importance that booksellers drive discovery, and particularly new authors. And then I think within our communities as a place, a safe, nice, enjoyable place for you. You could almost time it during the day. In the mornings, first things where after it's where people, after they've dropped the kids off at school, come and it's a place that you gather. It's where at lunchtime you get a different lot, you get the elderly, the lonely will be in our stores early and in those quieter times and lots of particularly elderly citizens, young kids at different times.

Then after school, boom, all the teenagers are in there having fun. Evenings, we are the introvert's dating place and we play all of these different roles within our communities and we provide really nice employment as well. It's flexible employment, and a bookstore plays an important part in that sort of general tapestry of a community.

Anne Morriss: Yeah, I think it's much bigger than books. It's almost a sacred place for a lot of people, and I think I would put myself on that list. There's also the piece about connecting to our humanity. There's a lot of writers who are no longer alive. We have their art in front of us. We connect to the past. There's a sense of possibility in the future. I think in moments of high uncertainty, there's a sense of order. Even just the kind of the rows of books calm our nervous systems down. I just think these are very powerful places, and you have played a huge role personally. 

Frances Frei: Huge role.

Anne Morriss: In protecting these spaces and bringing them back to life when it wasn't at all clear they were gonna make it.

James Daunt: I think yes, but in terms of mine, all what I in fact have done if has facilitated these bookstore teams to do it, I mean. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. I don't mean to imply you did it alone because that's not who you are. 

James Daunt: One of the great joys is the less I do, the more effective I am. But just in, in that respect, one, one of the things that previously having traveled through, when we come through JFK, where they're not perhaps the friendliest of immigration experiences. But now I have a Visa, and I obviously turn up on a fairly regular basis and they say, what do you do? And I say, I run Barnes and Noble. In which case they more or less roll out the red carpet. 

Anne Morriss: They melt. 

James Daunt: They melt. 

Frances Frei: Yes. 

James Daunt: Because they went into a Barnes and Noble bookstore, or their kids are, or their-

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm.

James Daunt: These are very nice spaces, and there is almost always a very quiet sense of goodwill within bookstores. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. Beautiful. I'm gonna ask you two final questions. One very unfair question. We're trying to reinvent government here in America. Any advice from the perspective of turning around a complex organization?

James Daunt: Oh, goodness me. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, be nice. 

James Daunt: It'd be nice, would be helpful. I think I each to their own and there are consequences to everything that one does. And thinking through all of that is, seems to me to be very important. And I say this as somebody who halved the number of people that we employ in, in the business on joining it.

And that's an awful thing to do. There's no euphemism that you can wrap around that. In my case, I did feel it was necessary. And the outcomes and consequences of that were positive ones, but one doesn't need to really take that responsibility and, um, personal consequences on those who are impacted, but also to what end are you doing it?

And take that very seriously. 

Anne Morriss: Beautiful. Is there anything else before we close? 

James Daunt: The question that I perhaps was anticipating, which hasn't come was, is, was what are your attitude to succession planning, or? 

Anne Morriss: No, what is your attitude towards this succession planning? It's a great question. 

James Daunt: Everybody should focus on that. And I think that's one of the measures by which I would expect to be judged. How good have you been at that? And that's both the continuity and I think it's in creating very strong cultures that creates its own sort of succession. Because if everybody espouses the same values, then those will continue. But nonetheless, you should not overstay your welcome as well. I have tested that by walking out of various workplaces and although I've kept the title, I did effectively leave Waterstones and effectively left Daunt Books at various stages. And have you got a very strong team there that can continue really uninterrupted and dare I say, slightly insultingly, do even better? That is a good measure. 

Anne Morriss: The ultimate measure. 

Frances Frei: We call it absence leadership. 

James Daunt: Ah, there you go. 

Anne Morriss: You can find that in our tedious book. 

James Daunt: No. 

Frances Frei: Which you can buy on Amazon. Oh yeah. 

James Daunt: I believe that I did, I did mean the manuals. 

Anne Morriss: James, you are even more awesome than we expected you to be, and our expectations were sky high. So thank you so much for being who you are and showing the world how to do this in a different way, which from our humble perspective seems to get a better outcome. So we are grateful for your time and your insight, and we are cheering you on. 

James Daunt: Thank you very much, and as I say, I remain embarrassed.

Anne Morriss: If you wanna figure out a workplace problem together, reach out. Send us a message, email, call, text. We're at fixable@ted.com or 234-FIXABLE. That's 234-349-2253. We read and listen to every one of your messages, so please do not be shy. 

Frances Frei: Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Your participation helps us make great episodes.

Please continue to do so.

Anne Morriss: Fixable is a podcast from TED. It's hosted by me, Anne Morriss.

Frances Frei: And me, Frances Frei. 

Anne Morriss: This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Daniella Balarezo and Roxanne Hai Lash. 

And our show is mixed by Louis at Story Yard.