A decade ago, on a Wednesday afternoon in September 2015, Target CEO Brian Cornell stood onstage at the Target Center arena in downtown Minneapolis beneath a Jumbotron projecting a chart showing how the retailer’s stock had dramatically outperformed that of its archrival, Walmart, in the preceding year, his first as chief executive.
The crowd of 13,000 Target employees attending the annual corporate gathering erupted into applause—to the delight of a grinning, clearly satisfied Cornell. The CEO had been brought in a year earlier as an outsider to fix the cheap-chic retailer, and his first moves were paying off. In hindsight, that moment of hubristic braggadocio may have provoked the wrath of the retail gods.
