Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar: An international conference on “Dr BR Ambedkar’s People’s Education Society: Past, Present & Future” will be held on September 11 and 12, 2026.

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The conference aims to provide an international academic platform for researchers, academicians, educationists, students, policymakers, social thinkers, professionals, alumni and delegates to deliberate on the legacy, contemporary relevance and future vision of the People’s Education Society, established under the leadership of Dr BR Ambedkar.

The conference will focus on education, social transformation, constitutional values, institutional governance, social inclusion, human values, Buddhist philosophy, and the future of education.

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The organising committee has invited research scholars, university and college teachers, academicians, educationists, policymakers, students, practitioners, social scientists, legal scholars, alumni and delegates from India and abroad to participate in the event.

The response to the conference has been encouraging, with research papers already received from different parts of India as well as France and Vietnam. Enquiries are also being received for both online and offline participation. The physical venue will be announced 15 days before the conference.

Authors have been requested to submit their papers by August 30, 2026. Delegate registration is open in both online and offline modes at PES Polytechnic.

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Authors, researchers, academicians, students, delegates and institutions have been invited to participate and contribute to making the international conference a meaningful academic tribute to the educational vision, social philosophy and transformative legacy of Dr BR Ambedkar.

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Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt.

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• Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt has executed an unlikely turnaround at the storied bookstore chain.
• Daunt said that steady improvements and empowering local booksellers have powered its comeback.
• He spoke about changing culture, data dangers, mistakes, and the power of authenticity on a podcast.

Bookstores might seem old school in the AI era, but Barnes & Noble has staged a fairy-tale comeback under CEO James Daunt.

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After shrinking to under 600 locations in 2023, the storied American bookstore chain opened 57 locations in 2024 — more than in the entire decade between 2009 and 2019.

It expanded by more than 60 stores last year, and it's targeting another 60 this year, it said in a news release this week.

Barnes & Noble was taken private in August 2019 when Elliott Management acquired it for close to $700 million, including debt. The hedge fund tasked Daunt — who led the turnaround of British bookstore chain Waterstones, which Elliott acquired in 2018 — to revitalize Barnes & Noble as well.

Daunt explained how he turned the page at Barnes & Noble during the latest episode of the "Masters of Scale" podcast. Here are the key insights from the conversation.

Culture change

Daunt said Barnes & Noble had the same core problem as Waterstones: its bookstores "weren't very good."

He said that for booksellers, attention to detail, presentation, service, assortment, inventory, and judgment all matter. Steadily improving those things year after year has been key to his success, he said.

But Daunt said another key plank of his strategy has been to shift away from centralized control of stores, and put local booksellers in charge instead.

"Almost everything I do is about flattening those hierarchies, and then trying to introduce collective responsibility amongst the team once you've done that," he said.

When each store's team is running the show, that's a "much nicer way to work, much more engaging and much more empowering, and all of those good things," he said.

"But it's so much more difficult that often people resist it: 'We'd rather have the hierarchy, just tell me what to do, please.'"

Daunt said that changing a company's culture takes time, and it's like "stretching a rubber band. The minute you relax, it just pops back."

Data danger

Daunt — who built his own independent bookstore chain, Daunt Books, before taking charge of Waterstones in 2011 — said that store data can be more of a curse than a blessing.

"The data can occasionally be an interesting reference point, but it's the judgments you make almost in defiance of the data that will give you an inspiring store," he said.

As data is often held centrally, relying on it can unlock a "Pandora's box" where it's used to "impose uniformity on the stores, and that really is the death knell for us," he said.

Setting aside the data "empowers the local stores to really start interrogating how they're engaging with their customer base," and to rely on their "gut instinct" when merchandising, he said.

He gave the example of a data-driven store allocating too much shelf space to board books, overwhelming parents whose young kids would happily read the same titles again and again, while not giving preteen readers the large array of books they want.

Daunt also noted that "booksellers and numbers tend to be sitting in opposite corners of the room."

"We are the nerds who read all our books, and when we got to the maths and science, just gave up," he quipped.

Forgetting mistakes

Daunt said that a key element of his approach — which has clear parallels to Warren Buffett's model of decentralized autonomy at Berkshire Hathaway — is moving on when mistakes get made.

Instead of scrutinizing and punishing errors, he prefers to "not look in the rear-view mirror," say something was "idiotic," and move on.

He's found that this encourages junior employees to challenge decisions from higher up and frees senior staff to change their minds.

Spreading the word

Daunt said that Barnes & Noble has no marketing department and has "zero marketing dollars to spend."

"But what we do have is young booksellers," he said. "And again, this model of leaving stores to do what they want turns out to be fantastically adapted for the social media age."

Daunt hailed BookTok, the passionate community of readers on TikTok, as a powerful source of word-of-mouth recommendations.

"As long as we leave it to the kids with the blue hair, we'll be fine," he joked.

Daunt added that there's no need for a broader marketing push behind popular books.

"The booksellers are fantastically good at communicating within store to store," he said. "Books that start taking off in one store just sort of spread like a rash through the business," he continued, adding that the organic process has a valuable authenticity.

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