CEO James Daunt shares how he rescued Waterstones and Barnes & Noble by empowering local store managers, rejecting centralized data-driven control, and fostering a bookseller culture that prioritizes curation over algorithms. His playbook: flatten hierarchies, embrace autonomy, and let authentic BookTok trends emerge organically from young employees rather than manufactured marketing campaigns. Local store autonomy and collective responsibility among booksellers drives better merchandising decisions than centralized data analysis, which tends to impose harmful uniformity across locations.