Best Buy May Have Already Found Its New CEO

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- On Tuesday, Best Buy's(BBY) interim CEO, Mike Mikan, held his first earnings conference call as the struggling retailer's leader.

While the event produced largely underwhelming results, if you're an optimist who can read between the lines and do some digging, there's room for hope.

Best Buy failed shareholders and lost customers because it underestimated, never truly acknowledged and reacted with a staggering level of ineptitude to the still-emerging dominance of Amazon.com(AMZN) .

Jeff Bezos saw the future and proceeded to dictate its terms to the rest of us. Like the company Steve Jobs built and Tim Cook can only hope to sustain, Amazon knew (and still knows) what you need and want before you do. With a blissful ignorance, Best Buy simply surfed through the last decade with a business model that has long had "broken" written all over it.

Under a not-so-impressive line of leaders, it spent the last year or so attempting to extract a massive tumor from itself with a pocket knife. I hope there's more in Best Buy's future than a little-too-late effort to reduce its big box footprint. On the call, Mikan led me to believe that there might be.

After a broad and not very informative tease of the company's short- and long-term plans, the interim CEO noted:

We're looking to bring in new talent with fresh perspectives for those new areas and change initiatives ... we're facing today, coupled with promoting from within.

Hope may have already arrived at Best Buy. The "new talent with fresh perspectives" is already on the payroll. And Best Buy's board of directors would be certifiably insane not to hire him or somebody like him.

Best Buy Needs to Think Like a Tech Company

Earlier this year, Best Buy lured Stephen Gillett away from Starbucks(SBUX) where he was CIO and head of digital ventures.