Value creation, innovative business models, and non-traditional marketing.

November 7, 2026

Toys R Us owed lenders about $400 million a year in interest, whether it sold toys or not.

Most people blame Amazon for killing it. Fortune's analysis says the debt landed the first blow. In 2005, Bain Capital, KKR and Vornado Realty Trust agreed to buy the chain for $6.6 billion. It was a leveraged buyout, so the debt fell on Toys R Us itself, about $5.2 billion of it. Picture the CEO's budget meeting. Your stores need updating to compete with Amazon and Walmart. Lenders already claim about $400 million of your year. Anything new waits in line behind the interest. Fortune's view was that Amazon and online shopping delivered the final push. Amazon did hurt. In 2000, Toys R Us signed a ten year deal making Amazon its exclusive online toy supplier. Amazon later let other sellers list toys too. Toys R Us sued in 2006 and won $51 million in 2009, more than half of the $93 million it claimed. That court award equaled about one eighth of one year's interest. When Toys R Us filed for Chapter 11 on September 18, 2017, it still carried about $5 billion in long term debt. The bankruptcy court approved more than $2 billion in new borrowing to pay suppliers. It announced 180 store closures in January 2018, and its last U.S. stores closed on June 29, 2018. Customers were still there: Fortune reported it held 15% of U.S. toy revenue and began 2018 with more than 800 U.S. stores. Amazon was the competitor everyone could see. The debt payment never took a day off, and it came due whether sales were good or bad. Write down what you must pay every month before you earn a dollar. Could you cover the biggest bill through three slow months?

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November 6, 2026

You get about 3 minutes of focus before something breaks it. Nearly half the time, that something is you.

Picture a founder on a Tuesday. She opens a pricing proposal. Four minutes later she checks Slack, though nobody asked her to. Then email, then a competitor's website. An hour later the proposal is still open, and she's sure her team keeps interrupting her. Gloria Mark, a researcher at UC Irvine, shadowed 36 managers, analysts, developers, engineers and project leaders for 3 days. On average, people worked 3 minutes and 5 seconds before they switched tasks or something interrupted them. About 44% of the interruptions came from the workers themselves. Nobody pinged them. After an interruption, people took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the original task, with about 2 other tasks in between. They did go back to about 82% of that work the same day. The damage is the delay, repeated across roughly 12 streams of work a day. Sophie Leroy calls the leftover piece attention residue. When you leave a task unfinished, part of your attention stays with it, which leaves less for the next task, and the effect grows when the work is demanding. Here are 3 things to try for a week. They're suggestions, not research findings: 1. Close email and chat during your most important task, and check them at set times instead. 2. Before you switch to anything else, write one line about where you stopped and what comes next. 3. Tally every time you reach for your phone or open a new tab with no ping prompting you. Write the count down each evening and compare days. What's the first thing you check when work gets hard? Be honest.

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November 5, 2026

Xerox invited Steve Jobs in on purpose, and it wanted Apple stock in return.

The legend says he stole the Mac from a lab. The receipt says a $1 million deal. Xerox Development Corporation invested $1 million in Apple and got the right to buy 100,000 shares before the IPO. Part of the arrangement was a reciprocal look at Xerox's research lab, PARC, which began building the Alto in 1972. In December 1979, Jobs, Jef Raskin and several engineers sat through 2 sessions on the Alto: a bitmap screen, a mouse, overlapping windows, all running Smalltalk. PARC also showed them a networking demo. Jobs said, "I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life." He was visibly excited and interrupted the demo repeatedly. Then Apple built the rest, and the rest was a lot. The Alto's mouse had 3 buttons. The Mac's had 1. Apple moved the menu bar to the top of the screen, added a trash can and wrote its own rules for clicks, dialogs and alerts. Larry Tesler, who came over from PARC, and Bill Atkinson were among the Apple designers behind it. The Mac shipped in 1984. Xerox sued in 1989. The court ruled that Xerox filed too late, and that the elements it claimed weren't protectable. PARC researcher Alan Kay said of the Mac: "The Mac is the first personal computer good enough to be worth criticizing." Jobs put it this way: Apple and Microsoft both took an idea from Xerox, not an implementation. "Stole" is the wrong word. Xerox had the idea and Apple had the product, and the product is the harder part. A clever demo in a lab doesn't get you a computer that a stranger can use on day one. Where do you draw the line between borrowing an idea and stealing one?

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