“Apple’s short-lived head of retail, John Browett, said this week that he had learned ‘humility’ and ‘become a kinder person’ as a result of his six-month stay at Apple,” Ben Lovejoy reports for MacRumors.
“Apple has yet to name a successor to Browett, with the company’s retail team currently reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook,” Lovejoy reports. “Browett admitted in an interview at the Retail Week Live conference (via The Independent) this week that he ‘just didn’t fit’ with Apple’s culture.”
Apple is a truly fantastic business. The people are great, they’ve got great products, it’s got a great culture and I loved working there, it’s a fantastic business. The issue there was that I just didn’t fit within the way they run the business. It was one of those things where you’re rejected for fit rather than competency. – John Browett
Read more in the full article here.
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I see, he’s having trouble finding a new job. Does Great Briton have Starbuck’s?
There will be an opening at the JCPenney CEO position fairly soon.
If there is a JCPenney…. if it weren’t for tools… Sears would be in this situation as well…
It’s a shame really. I was at King of Prussia mall last weekend. Compared to the Macy’s, which was dirty, cluttered and cramped, the J.C. Penney’s was clean (very clean actually), well laid out, and everything was kept in immaculate condition. I don’t know why more people don’t shop there.
I’m not as mad at him as I am whoever was responsible for hiring him. Someone had to put the final okey-dokey on him. That asshole needs to be fired. Maybe they were? How could you not know what type of a manager he is? That was a terrible mistake. Just one of many that Apple made in the last 12 months. I think Tim is cracking the whip a little now. I’m happy to see that he is treating Apple employees much better than Steve Jobs ever did. But that has nothing to do with hiring Browett. That was just a total fuck up. Nothing else. At least they did finally realize their mistake and cut their losses before he did irreparable harm.
Here. Here. The Apple Store at the Galleria Mall in Ft. Lauderdale has still not recovered from the era of idiocy that was John Browett’s misguided, and apparently free-reigned and unsupervised, adventure. I hate to go into that store now and that one person could so quickly screw up anything that was so hugely successful, would be unbelievable, if I did not see it with my own eyes. Someone besides Browett should be held accountable both for his hiring and allowing him to enact the policies from which the Apple Stores have yet to recover.
Kim Kardashian: “America’s Next Top Model rejected me because of my plastic injected butt, not because I look like trailer trash.”
John Browett nearly ran Apple retail into the ground in record time when he was at the helm. Call that a “fit” problem if you will, but it looks pretty damned incompetent to me. Good riddance, in any case.
Agreed. The fit problem was that in his “culture” things are expected to get crappier, not better. A complete inversal of expectations.
Captain Peacock of Grace Brothers might have an opening in the stickroom! Are you being served?
Only if Mr. Rumbold doesn’t get there first. And I am unanimous in that.
Okay Mrs. Slocombe, now don’t forget to feed your pu$$y. Fancy Feast is it?… (you got to know the show and British humor for that one, MDN folks)
You’ll find that it will ride up with wear.
Perhaps it’s both. You’re incompetent because you can’t find a way to fit with Apple’s culture of customer satisfaction.
Thing is, he’ll probably fit in anywhere else, a ‘business as usual’ type of exec.
Exactly. I don’t find people comprehend just how incredibly low the bar is these days in the self-destructive world of biznizz. I’d go so far as to say that if you aren’t ‘bent’ toward corruption, you’re not welcome at quite a few top 100 companies. (Witness what’s being uncovered about JP Morgan Chase today).
As I often rant, The Spirit of the Age is: Screw Thy Customer. In the case of Browett, that meant royally screwing over the retail employees as well. There’s a competency skill!
Demoralization as a competency criteria.
*cynical laugh* 😆
Being on a world stage allows your true colors to emerge. “Dickheads is as dickheads do”, to paraphrase Forrest Gump.
Umm, I don’t mean to be a dick here but how hard is it to run Apple retail?
I’d much more admire someone who is able to sell commodity shit better than anyone else because it would mean they were truly innovative with their store layout, style, marketing, etc.
But these are Apple products and they pretty much sell themselves. You can just about imagine being in a meeting when someone “brilliant” says, “I’ve got it. Clean industrial design . . . simple tables with the products sitting on them loaded up with media so people can really see how they work . . . Our sales people won’t be pushy, just kind of answer questions and help people find the right product for what they’ll use it for . . . And how about we have an area with some employees who really know their stuff so people can walk out with answers!”
All of this was in place before Steve died. It doesn’t need reinventing or tweaking. It really needs to be left alone. When it comes to store design, just design something that evokes some of the same feelings looking at an iMac, MacBook Air or iPhone gives off.
Hire me. I’ll do it!
It may seem obvious now, but a decade or so ago it was anything but. Many observers predicted a quick and painful end to Apple’s experiment in retail. In fact, quite a lot of genius went into the design and presentation of those first Apple stores.
I agree. But I’m not talking as much about then as now.
This guy inherited the model, and he still couldn’t figure it out.
I would argue that most of us who understand the value of Apple products and the aesthetic qualities of the hardware and software would be able to understand that, at least in retail, running Apple is more about a straight rudder than reinventing the wheel.
Step 1: Build great products. Step 2: Make sure the stores make them the focal point with few distractions.
Having reread my post, though, I can see how you might have thought I was making light of the initial genius of them. My bad.
When you don’t “fit” in with the most competent company, then it’s what exactly?
There is no evidence at all that Browett drove Apple Retail into the ground. Apple retail sales don’t show a fall off. The rate of attrition of employees doesn’t show any increase.
He didn’t fit. OK. But he didn’t harm them either.
I believe it’s fair to state at this point that I never met an Apple Store employee who didn’t SEVERELY RESENT the activities of John Browett. What he did to the moral of the Apple Store employees was 100% counter to the internal Apple business culture, to put it mildly. There was a collective sigh of relief when Browett was ousted.
The quickest and simplest way to demoralize your customers is to demoralize your employees. At that particular skill, Browett was highly competent. And obviously, that did not fit the Apple culture, or in fact any sane business culture.
I’ve got dirty details of exactly what Browett tried to pull. But at this point I think everyone concerned is simply glad the nightmare, and it was a nightmare, has ended.
Spelling Police: Please read “What he did to the MORALE of…”
Good catch there!
“Good catch”? Those kinds of obvious errors jump out as if they were in blinking text.
Many people are unaware of the mistakes or don’t even care about how they present themselves.
He was starting to harm – seriously. Gutting the very factors that make Apple’s stores insanely successful. That is profound incompetence and arrogance, not “fit”.
I’m with midwestmac. Steve put it in place. How dumb do you have to be to not continue with what is working so insanely well?
I vote for midwestmac to be head of Apple retail.
John, remember this phrase and you might find a new job; “Do You Want Fries With That?”
Fit and competency for Apple is the same, make Mr. Bowetr incompetent to be over retail sales.
incompetent[ in-kom-pi-tuhnt ]
adjective
1. not competent; lacking qualification or ability; incapable: an incompetent candidate.
The kindest thought I can come up with for John Browett would be that perhaps he was used to the minimum wage retail world where a company gets what they pay for, that being a bunch of don’t care, whatever, incompetents at the retail counter. When a biznizz is so screwed up that they can’t hire decent employees, they of course turn to the bottom line knee jerk response of treating the ‘whatever’ employees with negative reinforcement, aka demoralize them into doing their job. And no, that doesn’t make sense to me either, but it’s what they do.
This was certainly the attitude Browett expressed toward the Apple Store staff, universally verified from all the Apple Store staff I talked with.
IF ONLY Browett had taken the time to figure out what exactly he was managing, the brilliance of the Apple Store model and the remarkable quality and positivity of its staff, PERHAPS he would have realized the primitive idiocy of his negative reinforcement attitude and relented.
It could have happened! 😉
And how about the sick compensation this guy made? Worse, the disparity of the pay between John the exec vs the pay of the staff employees?
These days? That’s the default. So… It goes without saying. 😉
I so so so much hope this is the closest Apple ever gets again to Marketing-As-Management, that disease of biznizz whereby the people who produce nothing take over any part of a company and drive it into the ground. That certainly seemed to be Browett’s greatest skill at Apple.
Doubtful he could have ever figured it out. The sales per square foot number alone should have gotten his attention. The sales per retail employee should have been a hint. You don’t improve on those metrics by imposing policies that screw up the lives of the employees making it happen. He should face it, he’s just not that good and a slow learner to boot.
Let’s get back to the question of: WHO HIRED THIS DICK?! Let’s hope at least THEY learned something from this grandiose car wreck.
“I loved working there, it’s a fantastic business”
If he couldn’t adjust to make that work, he is incompetent.
Perhaps there is an overseas factory somewhere with benefit-less part time employees he can manage.
No MDN comment?!
He’s in the bathroom.