Alas...

Here is a lesson in corporate strategy from Radio Shack. As the article mentions, this should be a Harvard Business School case -- how a once dominant firm missed some opportunities that, in retrospect, are obvious.

(I’ll miss them if they die. When I was a kid, our home was filled with radios, cassette recorders, calculators, and police scanners all from Radio Shack. And they are still a go-to place for any kind of obscure electronic gear).

The article contends that Radio Shack could have been Best Buy, Amazon, or Dell. Theoretically, yes. But those were also new firms when the home computing revolution took hold. Radio Shack had been around forever; for an established firm to have the flexibility and foresight to become “the next Amazon” is easier said than done.

This blog entry provides even more historical perspective.

But now what? If you were CEO for a day, what strategy would you employ to turn this company around?