The untold tale of Target Canada's difficult birth, tough life and brutal death

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Invite Friends CEO Picks - The most popular editorials that have stood the test of time! The untold tale of Target Canada's difficult birth, tough life and brutal death The story of the ambitious entry plan of American retailer Target into Canada and how it ultimately bombed (bankruptcy protection after $7bn in investment) is something that anyone in the business world can learn from. From aggressive targets, to bad software decisions, to a lack of understanding of local nuances, anything that could go wrong went wrong. Also, the human stories of how bad business decisions can affect the lives of thousands of employees is telling.

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Age of Abundance: How the Content Explosion will Invert the Media Industry This article doing the rounds on social media talks about how curators will play a more and more important role in media. The entire media industry is being turned upside down because content creation and distribution is so easy now (anybody can write, sing, act and create content with the potential to attract a large audience on social media). However, consumer attention is still limited, so trusted curators (platforms, influencers) will play an increasingly important role in helping users discover good content.

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So what is the definition of a startup? As per Paul Graham of YCombinator fame, a startup is a company that is designed to grow really fast (5-7% a week is an internal YC benchmark). That's it. Nothing else matters. Growth could be revenue or it could be active users. Of course, trickery like bribing users with more money than their lifetime value doesn't count. The beautiful thing about being narrowly focused on growth is that other factors like capital, talent and eventually revenues and profits generally follow if you have growth. But growth is elusive and is never smooth, even in the case of seemingly seamless journeys like that of Facebook or early days Twitter. These companies had to employ growth teams whose job was to ensure that user growth continued from millions of users to tens of millions to hundreds of millions.