“I was wrong” are three of the hardest words for anyone to utter, but many CEOs seem to have a particularly hard time admitting when they have made a mistake.
So it was refreshing when departing Kohl’s CEO Tom Kingsbury last week recognized that some of his moves, such as carrying much less inventory for some of its leading clothing brands and dialing back its fine jewelry business, were key factors in its recent 9.3% slide in quarterly comparable sales. That was one of the worst performances of any major publicly traded retailer in the third quarter and continued a long trend of decline for Kohl’s.
