Not only was he handpicked by Steve Jobs to build the Apple Stores but he had been credited with playing a major role in turning Target from a K-Mart look-alike into the trendy-but-cheap Tar-zhey by the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Now, he was tasked with turning around JC Penny: the department store whose market share dropped from 57% in 1992 to 31% in 2011.

The idea was simple: take the best ideas from his experience at Apple and apply them to the department store.

When Johnson pitched his idea to shareholders in a series of New York City meetings, they couldn’t have been more optimistic. JC Penney’s stock price went from $26 in the summer of 2011 to $42 in early 2012 on the strength of the pitch. All Johnson had to do now was execute.

But the idea failed almost immediately.

His new pricing model (eliminating discounting) was a flop. The coupon-hunters rebelled. Much of his new product was deemed too trendy. His new store model was wildly expensive for a middling department store chain. JC Penney customers had no idea what was going on, and by 2013, Johnson was sacked. The stock price sank into the single digits.

What went wrong in the quest to build the greatest department store?

The main issue was not that Johnson was incompetent. He wasn’t. He wouldn’t have gotten the job if he was. He was extremely competent. But it was exactly his competence and past success that got him into trouble.

He was like a great swimmer that tried to tackle a grand rapid, and the model he used successfully in the past, the map that had navigated a lot of difficult terrain, was not the map he needed anymore. He had an excellent theory about retailing that applied in some circumstances, but not in others. The terrain had changed, but the old idea stuck.

Have you ever been in Ron Johnson’s position? Having to face the harsh reality of failure when you were so certain of your inevitable success? This often happens, as it did with Johnson and JC Penny, when you forget that the map of reality is not reality.

Put simply, the map is not the territory. That’s because maps are reductions of what they represent. If a map were to represent the territory with perfect fidelity, it would no longer be a reduction and thus would no longer be useful to us. This is important to keep in mind as you think through problems and make decisions.

But simply knowing the map is not the territory is much easier than knowing what to do because the map is not the territory. When you’re in the heat of a big decision, remembering: “Okay, the map is not the territory” is difficult. And what good is knowing the definition of models if you don’t know how to apply them?

That’s why we’ve created Mental Models for Better Thinking–our online course that will teach you how to apply mental models to your everyday thinking.

Throughout the course, you’ll learn a simple 5-step system that takes what you’ve read about mental models and gives you a framework for how to actually use them in your everyday life. Instead of rapidly deciding things on the fly, you’ll learn how to integrate models into your thought process so you can become a better thinker and decision-maker. You can learn more about the course here.

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