Matthew is a business reporter at BuzzFeed.

My longread of the week is ‘At Sears, Eddie Lampert’s Warring Divisions Model Adds to the Troubles,’ by Mina Kimes in Bloomberg Businessweek. This is not a profile of Eddie Lampert, the hedge fund manager who masterminded Kmart’s acquisition of Sears and is now running the struggling retailer. The piece, based on interviews with former Sears executives and employees, is instead an examination of what happened to Sears after Lampert took over and implemented a strategy based on his Ayn Rand inflected worldview. Lampert’s big idea is that the 30-plus different segments of Sears operate more or less independently and compete for resources and attention. Kimes is never able to actually speak with Lampert in person or see him operate, and so she paints a portrait not of the man — which is where so much business magazine journalism starts and ends — but of something far more important: the results.

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