What Retail Legend Ron Johnson Learned from Apple’s Success and JCPenney’s Failure

Turn breakthrough ideas into real results at the virtual HBR Innovation Summit this November with top CEOs and masterclasses on AI and growth. Register by September 30th and save 25%. Learn more at hbr.org slash innovation summit. I'm Audie Ignatius. I'm Alison Beard and this is the HBR Ideacast.

So Alison, today we're going to look at an executive who has had a fascinating business career. who achieved phenomenal highs and then endured humbling lows, someone who brought the same playbook to two different companies, and it worked at one and it failed at the other. Okay, I'm definitely intrigued. Who is this? So this person is Ron Johnson, who killed it at Apple, working closely with Steve Jobs to invent and then roll out the Apple store.

He eventually left Apple to become CEO of JC Penney, a more modest department store chain, and there his big ideas simply didn't work. Okay, I followed both of those stories as they were happening, but I don't know all the details, so I'm interested to hear more. Well here you go. So Ron is the author of a new book, Shop Different, How Retail Revealed Apple's Genius, and we talked about how he delivered on an ambitious vision at Apple, even bringing along an initially skeptical Steve Jobs, and we talked about what he learned when the same brash approach didn't work at JCPenney. Here's our conversation.

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