TECHIE
‘The whole mandate was reinvention’ Inside the decisions that reshaped Ingram Content Group after the FTC ended the company’s sale to Barnes & Noble 22 years ago n his recently published book, “The Family Business: How Ingram Transformed the World of Books,” local writer Keel Hunt sketches out the history and evolution of what is today Ingram Content Group, a holding company for publishing services ventures that employs more than 4,000 people around the world. In this excerpt from the book, Hunt details the aftermath of the company’s attempted sale to Barnes & Noble, which was torpedoed by the Federal Trade Commission in the spring of 1999. It was time to reset and reinvent parts of the business, especially when it came to equipping itself for the digital age.
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Reflecting on the collapse of the B&N deal, John Ingram says: “My way of dealing with the disappointment was to figure out, ‘Okay, what do we do next?’ I am much happier and more settled when I have a North Star and I’m working hard to aim myself and the organization in that general direction. I think part of our success has been that I have a bit of an innate sense about that, and then I combine it with a strong organization to help filter through the stuff I come up with that is wrong
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or bad. I’ve told people that I think our success has been based on the fact that I’m an entrepreneur inside the organization and I have a sense about things — and I think I’m usually directionally correct about it. Of course, I’m not always right. But hopefully I’m right more often than not.” At the start of the new millennium, Ingram had annual sales of over $1 billion and shipped 115 million product units a year. It was certainly not a business on the edge of collapse, or anything close to that. As John noted in one interview, “Ingram remains a strong company today with solid customer relationships and a loyal base of associates. For now, we plan to continue operating independently. We will continue to evaluate any opportunities that will help us better adapt to marketplace changes and strengthen services to our customers.”
All true. But Ingram still had some serious thinking to do about what its future should be in a rapidly changing book business. The shifts roiling the industry — including both consolidation at all levels of the publishing supply chain and the increasing efforts by companies to improve their own distribution capabilities and so reduce their reliance on Ingram — would require some fresh innovation from the company’s leaders. By January 2000, following three decades of steady growth and penetration into new market segments, Ingram Book Group’s total employment stood at 4,450 across all its companies and divisions. This work force was mostly deployed in eight major facilities — seven distribution centers plus a returns center — across the North American continent. But with the broader industry in a sustained peri-
