“After six solid–if not remarkable–years of a housing recovery, and pretty good business times for many of the firms in the BUILDER community, it may seem odd to broach the subject of survival,” writes John McManus in his recent essay about Sears’ impending bankruptcy. Sears – the Amazon.com of its day – was an early and important player in American housing, selling thousands and thousands of kit homes that it shipped in rail cars all across the country, which created a demand for appliances and furnishings that families also bought from Sears to fill their new homes.
As Sears and other iconic American companies such as Kodak and Radio Shack fade away, McManus warns that today’s companies – including those that build houses (and, by extension, decks) – would be wise to pay attention to the factors that can lead to both their growth and their demise. One of them is innovation, which McManus says is not a one-time solution. “Sears–which was an innovative company to start, and had innovation in its DNA–ultimately foundered on its inability to envision, self-disrupt, and re-organize its strategic and operational models to keep pace with where retail has gone.”