Good morning. Earlier this week, I traveled to Target headquarters in Minneapolis to interview newly minted CEO Michael Fiddelke. Target had just reported a straight fourth quarter of comparable sales decline, continuing a slump that has seen it lose market share to many rivals. That same day, Fiddelke laid out for an audience of Wall Street analysts an ambitious plan he said would bring the most change Target has seen in a decade. But Fiddelke, a 23-year company lifer who took the reins five weeks ago, said that plan can’t work unless Target returns to a culture of talking honestly about failures.
“Candor is one of the things culturally that’s really important for us right now, because you can’t solve problems you’re not talking about,” Fiddelke told me. While that might sound squishy, it does echo the approach taken by Macy’s CEO Tony Spring, who told me the same thing in October and has watched the retailer’s long-awaited turnaround take hold.
Fiddelke, 49, is not kidding about the pace of change at Target: the cheap-chic retailer, which was thrown off its game by a COVID business boom and culture wars over DEI and LGBTQ rights, is overhauling categories it previously “owned” such as home goods, and clothing. It will add more space to its grocery sections, revamp its beauty business, and will ramp up store remodelings and renovations.
A culture that didn’t favor candor in recent years led to boring and off-trend offerings and stores that have lost a lot of their zhuzh, yielding weak sales for three years. (Target expects net sales to be up slightly this year, and shares rose 7% on Tuesday.)
Fiddelke, who grew up on a farm in Iowa, says he learned early in his career at Target how crucial brutal honesty is to professional and corporate success. He spent his first five years on the retailer’s finance team before doing a tour of duty in stores that he thought would be a breeze. “I thought I had this place figured out. I was full of strong opinions about what Target should and shouldn’t do,” he recalls. It didn’t take long for things to go south. “I didn’t know the first thing about what it really takes to run a store on the front lines.”
After he confessed to his boss that he was out of his depth, she told him that the admission paved the way for professional growth. “If you’re vulnerable and curious, then candid, now we can do the work to learn,” he recalls her saying. And that’s a lesson he knows he needs to tap as he works to make Target “Tarzhay” again.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
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S&P 500 futures are down 0.21% this morning. The last session closed down 0.56%. The STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.05% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.09% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 0.62%. China’s CSI 300 was up 0.27%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 1.72%. South Korea’s KOSPI was up 0.02%. India’s NIFTY 50 was down 1.28%. Bitcoin was down to $70K.
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CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams, Claire Zillman and Lee Clifford.
