Robert J. Ulrich of Dayton Hudson has been with the firm for 30 years, and has been the CEO for the past three years. Ulrich is now 54 years old and was born Minneapolis, Minnesota where Target has its headquarters. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelors Degree in 1967. These are just several facts about one of the most powerful executives in the retail business. According to Forbes' 500, Ulrich is ranked number 5 among all the other 45 executives in the retailing industry and 128 among the 800 other executives in their survey of top executives. These are a couple of reasons for the success of Robert J. Ulrich, CEO of Dayton Hudson.
According to one of my co-workers at Target Greatland in Glendale Heights, Ulrich was just another employee who started out as a cart attendant at a store in Minnesota and worked his way up the corporate ladder and made it all the way to the top after 27 years of hard work. Now, as CEO of Dayton Hudson, Ulrich has more to worry about than pushing carts around. He has to make decisions according to a multi-million dollar industry with the Dayton Hudson Corporation. Ulrich's promotion came in the summer of 1994 when Kenneth Macke, the former CEO of Dayton Hudson, was forced to retire after ten years and some great accomplishments. Ulrich was faced with the challenge of keeping a consistent rate of 15% per year earnings growth that shareholders expected. The firm thought that Ulrich possessed some of the necessary traits that would relate to the success of the corporation. They are correct so far, Ulrich has had to make some tough decisions, and because of his characteristics of being competitive, aggressive, and creative he has risen to these challenges. As Ulrich stepped in, his first goal was to strengthen the company economically. In order for him to do this he would need to cut costs somewhere, but he didn't know where. The consumers thought he might reverse the companies policy of giving back to the community in attempts to cut costs, but this is not what Ulrich felt was the right thing to do. Ulrich had other plans in mind.
Ulrich has always believed that the power of Dayton Hudson was because of its three different divisions working as one to give the firm maximum leverage. These three being Target, Mervyn's, and the department store chains which includes Dayton, Hudson, and Marshall Fields. The next step that Ulrich had in mind was to implement to Mervyn's what was working very well with Target. He wanted to value price at Mervyn's in hopes of boosting the overall sales. After several attempts at his plan, Mervyn's still showed no sign of profits, but Ulrich was still anxious to make it work even though analysts from the Wall Street said, "We would like to see Dayton Hudson broken up and its three divisions operating as separate companies in order to maximize shareholder value." Ulrich began to open his eyes to these new possibilities. Why did he want to hold back the growth of Target with the lagging Mervyn's holding it down. I don't know if we will ever find out why. Maybe Ulrich saw something in Mervyn's that everyone else failed to recognize.
To this day Ulrich is faced with these two problems at Dayton Hudson and still hasn't changed his mind on either. The first decision to keep Mervyn's I think may be a lost cause by know. If it wasn't for Mervyn's I think Target could expand to new dimensions that are bigger and better than those of other retail operations. The second decision of where to cut costs I would have to agree with 100%. Ulrich has decided to keep contributing to the communities in which Target stores are involved in and instead cut costs by eliminating some of the management positions, cutting leisure expenditures, and cut down on the amount of traveling being done.
After researching more on Robert J. Ulrich I realized that he not only displayed a very positive work ethic, but also made some very ethical decisions in the process of his career at Dayton Hudson. Ulrich is a good example of how a CEO should run a firm and showed how effectively it can be done, even if he did start out as a cart attendant in the cold winters of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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