In the bull’s-eye
On eve of shareholders’ gathering
Top officials of the nation’s No. 2 retailer can expect a grilling at the company’s annual meeting Wednesday.
MINNEAPOLIS — Target Corp.’s entire leadership team has moved to the 26th floor of its downtown Minneapolis headquarters and the company is literally tearing down walls to help streamline decisions, interim CEO John Mulligan said in a memo to employees.
“What used to be called the executive committee has been renamed the leadership team, because all across Target, we need more ‘leadership’ and less ‘committee,’ “Mulligan wrote in the memo, which circulated Monday.
The company also announced Tuesday that it has hired someone to fill the position of chief information security officer. Brad Maiorino, who held the same positions at General Motors Co., will start Monday. Target created this new position after the data breach as one of its steps to help ensure customer data is protected from future security threats.
The two developments come a day ahead of Target’s annual meeting in Dallas, where both executives and board members are facing intense scrutiny for the way they have led the nation’s second-biggest retailer.
Two shareholders advisory companies have recommended that shareholders replace Target’s longest- serving board members.
And one of the companies, Institutional Shareholder Services, said that seven of Target’s 10 directors should be ousted to hold them accountable for stumbles that included a data breach that compromised the financial information of millions of customers and missed performance goals.
The board pushed out chairman and CEO Gregg Steinhafel last month and tapped Mulligan, its chief financial officer, to lead the company while it searches for a new leader.
Maiorino will report to Bob DeRodes, Target’s recently hired chief information officer, who replaced an executive who resigned in the aftermath of the data breach.
“Having led this critical function at two of the country’s largest companies, Brad is widely recognized as one of the nation’s top leaders in the complex, evolving areas of information security and risk,” DeRodes said in a statement.
“As an organization, we have made a commitment to our guests and our team that Target will be a retail leader in information security and protection.”
In recent weeks, Mulligan has been more open in acknowledging that Target had become bogged down in bureaucracy and was slow to implement change. As the retailer looks to speed up innovation amid sluggish sales, the phrase “removing roadblocks” has become his new mantra.
By placing all the company’s senior executives in one place, Mulligan said in the new memo that the 26th floor will become a “hub of real-time action and decision-making, open to everyone.”