After spending 2 years of my life in a retail turnaround backed by an activist investor (Eddie Lampert at SHLD), I can't say i'm that surprised.

This game of retail is much harder than it looks from afar. Certainly much harder than working at places like Google or Apple - mainly because the market forces are against you. You're working with low margins, high capex, deteriorating infrastructure, deflated brands, legacy technology and a legacy customer base. To top it off, the shear momentum of companies this large (at SHLD we had 300,000 employees) is alone hard to grapple with even if you didn't have market forces against you. It's a daunting task.

If non-linear equity growth was easy, everyone would be doing it. Turnarounds are not for the weak of heart. Turnarounds in that sense, are actually similar to startups.