I'm not completely up to date on the happenings at JCP, but my understanding was that Ron's strategy was going to take time to be fully realized. I would not be surprised if this is short term thinking getting in the way of a long term strategy. Regardless, JCP shareholders should be very worried since now they've traded a potentially flawed strategy with effectively no strategy at all.
While I'd normally agree that shareholders can't be trusted to make sound long-term strategy decisions, in this case Johnson demolished JCP's financials over the past few quarters.
I think part of the problem is that he had short term changes and long term changes. His long term changes, which include making over the store to have mini-stores in it and new brands, seem to be pretty successful. But his short term changes like getting rid of sales were pretty much complete failures, and caused the sales at the existing stores to drop disastrously.
Honestly, if he had not changed the pricing strategy, he would probably still have a job.
