Book Excerpt February 26, 2010, 1:11PM EST

Book Excerpt: Denial at Sears

From Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face—and What to Do About It, Richard S. Tedlow tells how the retailer let ego get the best of it

By Richard S. Tedlow

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Beware the monument.

Please bear with me for a moment and read the following short poem that Shelley published in 1818, entitled Ozymandias:

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear

quot;My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias was a heavy hitter in days gone by. He built a huge statue of and to himself. If the meaning of the statue was not clear enough, he had inscribed on the pedestal that he was such a big shot that "ye [other] Mighty" were reduced to despairing at his magnificence.

But, look! The ruins of the statue were all that survived, and it has become nothing more than a "colossal wreck." Whatever the "works" were that should have caused despair to the mighty have now disappeared into the sands of time.

Gordon Metcalf became CEO of Sears in 1967. Odds are, he had never read Shelley's poem. "Being the largest retailer in the world," he said, "we thought we should have the largest headquarters in the world." So, just as cracks began to appear in the armor of Sears—despite a seemingly robust bottom line, some metrics, like return on equity and employee productivity, had begun to flag—Metcalf decreed that Sears would construct the world's tallest building. The 110-story Sears Tower, renamed Willis Tower in 2009, came to be known as "Gordon Metcalf's last erection."

On the surface, Metcalf's explanation for building the Tower seems to make sense. But when you really think about it, it doesn't. The two clauses have nothing to do with one another, and the declaration cannot survive one single word: Why? Why is it that the world's largest retailer should have the world's largest headquarters?

In 1993, when Intel was experiencing its spectacular growth, CEO Andy Grove, like the rest of the company's employees, had not an office but a cubicle. It was tiny. Fortune, in a clever variant of a classic retail metric, conducted a return to the shareholders survey that year. It measured return to the shareholders per square foot of the CEO's office. Grove led the pack by far, as Intel returned $1.64 per square foot of his cubicle.

It was not apparent that Intel needed a giant building to celebrate how wonderful it was. Why was it so obvious at Sears?

Building monuments deserves a file drawer along with trash talking when you are looking for companies in denial. I recall interviewing top executives in the Sears Tower in the summer of 1980. The pictures on their walls were quite beautiful. I wondered whether the average Sears customer could have afforded the frames. The furniture was plush. It didn't look like it came off the floor of a Sears store.

I remember looking out the windows. The view up Chicago's lakeshore was spectacular. And there was not a competitor in sight. The people down below looked like ants. Those ants were supposed to be Sears's customers. Of all industries, it is most important for a retailer to keep his or her ear to the ground. The Tower was a symbolic denial of that reality.

The year the Tower was dedicated, 1973, was the first year of the chairmanship of Arthur Wood. Writer Donald Katz described him as "patrician," "elegant," "the consummate old-world gentleman-businessman." His opulent office included works from his private art collection by Degas and Monet.

Wood was unlike Kmart's great merchant Harry Cunningham.