daunt

He maintains close relationships with some House Republicans who backed a different speaker candidate last winter, in a dispute that fueled party divisions that continue to daunt the chamber.

The fact that their majority was much smaller than they expected did not daunt them any more than it daunted the House Republicans in 1998 when they unexpectedly lost seats as they pursued the impeachment of President Clinton.

The Cambridge-educated Daunt had started his own chain of independent bookstores in Britain, then taken over as CEO of Waterstones, a floundering British bookstore chain that Elliott had acquired in June 2018.

The apparent turnaround at Barnes & Noble isn’t entirely the product of Daunt’s strategy.

It’s also true that Daunt’s key strategic move of giving store managers the latitude to make inventory decisions themselves rather than binding them to central ordering out of New York parallels the approach of independent bookstores nationwide.