The Big Store Now Available as Audible Book

Before founding Audible, CEO Don Katz spent six years with near-carte blanche access to Sears, arguably the 20th century’s great American corporation, and wrote The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears.

In a new Audible edition, available for free, Katz writes and performs an updated introduction reflecting on the lessons he learned from Sears that have inspired and cautioned him at Audible along the way.

“Themes that have drawn students of corporate culture and leadership to The Big Store regularly since it was published in 1987 — including those seeking to avoid the pridefulness and myopia that can come with institutional success, which in turn diminishes a positively disruptive capacity to change and can kill the formative spirit that calls for invention before anyone asks for it — are very much alive in current popular discourse,” Katz writes.

Katz was interviewed about the The Big Store, which won the inaugural Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, on “CBS Sunday Morning” on Dec. 16, and an excerpt ran in USA Today on Jan. 11.