A decade ago, on a Wednesday afternoon in September 2015, Target CEO Brian Cornell stood onstage at the Target Center arena in downtown Minneapolis beneath a Jumbotron projecting a chart showing how the retailer’s stock had dramatically outperformed that of its archrival, Walmart, in the preceding year, his first as chief executive.
The crowd of 13,000 Target employees attending the annual corporate gathering erupted into applause—to the delight of a grinning, clearly satisfied Cornell. The CEO had been brought in a year earlier as an outsider to fix the cheap-chic retailer, and his first moves were paying off. In hindsight, that moment of hubristic braggadocio may have provoked the wrath of the retail gods.
Both Cornell and Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who had taken the reins at that retailer six months before that moment in 2015, have announced in recent weeks they were giving up their respective corner offices on Feb. 1, to be replaced by their lieutenants. But the performance of both CEOs, and their companies, have diverged immensely since that Jumbotron presentation.
McMillon has been lauded for modernizing the tradition-bound Walmart, which has become a tech and e-commerce powerhouse capable of holding its own against the rising threat of Amazon and positioning itself well for the AI era. Walmart shares have risen 300% since McMillon, who started his career as a warehouse worker at Walmart unloading trucks, became CEO. During his run, annual revenue rose nearly $200 billion to $681 billion.
