In my own words...
gregory_josefowicz
Gregory P. Josefowicz
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Borders Group, Inc.
Borders Group, Inc. is a $3.7 billion global retailer of books, music and movies with approximately 1,200 Borders and Waldenbooks stores worldwide.

Gregory Josefowicz (BA Marketing ’74) joined Borders Group in November 1999. Before joining Borders Group, Josefowicz had a long career with Jewel-Osco, a Midwest food and drug store chain. He began at Jewel-Osco as a high school student in 1968, and over the years worked his way up through posts in merchandising, marketing and operations before achieving the title of company president in 1997.

Josefowicz also holds a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and serves on the school’s Management Advisory Board. Josefowicz is a member of the board of advisors of the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and of the Michigan District of Key Bank, both located in Ann Arbor, Mich. In addition, he serves on the board of directors of PETsMART, a leading pet supply and services retailer, as well as the metal services company, Ryerson Tull.

 

By the Book

Early work, Lifelong learning

Why did you decide to go to school at Michigan State?

Michigan State was one of three universities where I applied following my graduation from St. Patrick’s High School in Chicago, where I was a part of the National Merit Scholarship Program. Michigan State recruited heavily from that program. I liked the school’s size, scope and outstanding reputation. I had received college scholarship funds from my employer, leading food and drug chain Jewel-Osco, and could have gone to other schools, but Michigan State really reached out to me and this outreach was a significant factor in my decision.

Creating customer value is central to the retail businesses you’ve led successfully…so how would you rate the value of your Broad School degree?

Throughout my experiences at Michigan State and in the Broad School, where I had the opportunity to interact with professors such as Jack Allen who taught classes in supermarket retail and continued to be a mentor, I was introduced in many different ways to the concept of creating customer value as a primary driver of success for any organization. In fact, within the supermarket world, where I spent a significant part of my career and even my high school and college years working, I was able to see every day that meeting customer needs is the most important and most challenging aspect of business.

How does the career you have today match the goals you set for yourself as a student?

Like many students, in the early part of my undergrad years, I really didn’t have firm career goals. At that time, I was already working in the grocery industry with a leading food and drug retailer and had developed a keen interest in retail. Yet, many other fields of study also fascinated me, and I explored them at Michigan State. I progressed from majoring in Political Science to Biology/Pre-med, and then my interests led to Economics and I found my way to the Broad School to major in Business with a concentration in Marketing.

So, in essence, I had my ongoing work experience with the food and drug company linked with a university that offered immense opportunity and was able to help me channel my interests. Connecting your early work experience to your education is important and is something I generally share with students when I return to Michigan State to speak.

People have core competencies, just as businesses do. What are yours?

My experiences at the Broad School and Michigan State helped cultivate some core competencies that were supported in my work experience and have sustained my development over the years. For example, my training in finance, accounting and other very practical skills instilled in me an ability to make decisions based on fact. While other aspects come into play, cutting through to the facts and focusing on them is a useful skill in business and especially in retail where our customers give us a report card every day in the form of sales reports.

Michigan State was also important in developing my core competency as a husband and father. I met Carol, my wife of over 20 years, at Michigan State and today our daughter Lauren is a student there studying Accounting. We have two other daughters, Lynne and Leslie. Lynne attends the “other” Michigan school and Leslie earned a degree from Northwestern, which is where I earned my MBA.

Was your move to Borders, after 30 years in the retail grocery business, as dramatic a change as it would appear? Why was that the right choice for you?

In many ways, retail is retail whether you are talking about the grocery business or the bookselling business. Customer value is paramount in all of retail and the levers that make a successful retail business of any kind…things like selection, cost of goods, price, supply chain efficiencies, marketing and others…do not change.

However, in selling books, music and movies, we have a unique connection to our customers. People identify with the book that changed their life on a different level than they do canned peas, for example. That distinction is an important one and means that we must manage our business at Borders in a different way than the grocery business. For example, selection is important in both businesses and it is our clear distinction in Borders stores. Yet, making that huge selection relevant to customers on an ongoing basis — especially when their individual interests cannot be predicted — is more of a challenge. All in all, coming to Borders Group as CEO was the right choice for me. I am an avid reader and the opportunity to be surrounded by books is incredible. Also, I’ve had the opportunity to grow and develop new insights and understanding of customer dynamics that are invaluable.

What are you reading now? Any good management books you’d like to recommend?

I am now reading American Dream by New York Times reporter Jason DeParle, who profiles the lives of three women in one extended family in Milwaukee and their experiences with the welfare system and exiting that system against the backdrop of Clinton-era politics. It’s fascinating.

I’d also recommend Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Earle Stegner. This book was published in 1987 and is an insightful novel that portrays the lives of two couples and communicates poignantly about the nature of marriage, relationships, friendships, maturing and many aspects of life. Another compelling new book is Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald who explores the Enron situation in a style that reads like a mystery novel.

Finally, for a pure business book, I’d recommend Confronting Reality by Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy. The authors challenge companies to assess with unflinching honesty the existing business model, and they provide insight into managing through change. The book has added meaning at Borders Group because our company has been fortunate to have Ram Charan work with us in a consulting capacity.