The company (with Howard's full knowledge and approval) spent years recklessly building stores with nothing but "gut feel" to guide decisions. When the economy went bust, they continued to build build build. It wasn't until 2009 that they laid people off from Store Development. Howard blamed all of the long time senior executives and fired or pushed ALL but one of them out of the company, along with hundreds of smart, talented, long time employees. The company is now full of cronies that managed to hang on to their positions by agreeing to programs conceived by Howard over a weekend and that lost millions more for the company.
IT is totally dysfunctional: projects with real ROI are shelved unless you spend an entire year politicking to get 30 signatures just to start working on defining the project. Projects with the strongest, hardest business case that you've ever seen are shut down simply due to a accounting or process technicality. IT processes are constantly changing and none of them are documented. When you think you have figured out a process, it will get changed the next time you try to get a project approved. Change itself is not a problem, if it actually made sense or there was some business value to it, but most of the changes are arbitrary and punitive.
Many of the new leadership positions tend to be filled with inexperienced and unskilled cast offs from other companies. If you like working for someone who you will never learn anything from, this is the place for you.
Corporate Social Responsibility would be great if was actually backed up with real business value. There seem to be pet projects from Howard that sound great on the surface and make everyone "feel good", but have no real proof that they conserve resources; these projects tend to get all the money and attention, while real projects with strong business cases, get caught up in an endless bureaucratic, ever changing process loop.
