Paper Renovating Home Depot
|Renovating Home Depot |
|By Brian Grow, with Diane Brady in New York and Michael Arndt |
| |
|Adapted from Business Week, March 2006 |
|Skip the touchy-feely stuff. The big-box store is thriving under CEO Bob Nardelli's military-style rule |
Five years after his December, 2000, arrival, Chief Executive Robert L. Nardelli is putting his stamp on what was long a decentralized, entrepreneurial business under founders Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank. And if his company starts to look and feel like an army, that's the point. Nardelli loves to hire soldiers. In fact, he seems to love almost everything about the armed services. The military, to a large extent, has become the management model for his entire enterprise. Of the 1,142 people hired into Home Depot's store leadership program, a two-year training regimen for future store managers launched in 2002, almost half, 528 are junior military officers. More than 100 of them now run Home Depots.” It’s one thing to have faced a tough customer. It's another to face the enemy shooting at you. So they probably will be pretty calm under fire."
Nardelli is a detail-obsessed, diamond-cut-precise manager who, in 2000, lost his shot at the top job at General Electric Co. Overall, some 13% of Home Depot's 345,000 employees have military experience, vs. 4% at Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Importing ideas, people, and platitudes from the military is a key part of Nardelli's sweeping move to reshape Home Depot, the world's third-largest retailer, into a more centralized organization. That may be an untrendy idea in management circles, but
|By Brian Grow, with Diane Brady in New York and Michael Arndt |
| |
|Adapted from Business Week, March 2006 |
|Skip the touchy-feely stuff. The big-box store is thriving under CEO Bob Nardelli's military-style rule |
Five years after his December, 2000, arrival, Chief Executive Robert L. Nardelli is putting his stamp on what was long a decentralized, entrepreneurial business under founders Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank. And if his company starts to look and feel like an army, that's the point. Nardelli loves to hire soldiers. In fact, he seems to love almost everything about the armed services. The military, to a large extent, has become the management model for his entire enterprise. Of the 1,142 people hired into Home Depot's store leadership program, a two-year training regimen for future store managers launched in 2002, almost half, 528 are junior military officers. More than 100 of them now run Home Depots.” It’s one thing to have faced a tough customer. It's another to face the enemy shooting at you. So they probably will be pretty calm under fire."
Nardelli is a detail-obsessed, diamond-cut-precise manager who, in 2000, lost his shot at the top job at General Electric Co. Overall, some 13% of Home Depot's 345,000 employees have military experience, vs. 4% at Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Importing ideas, people, and platitudes from the military is a key part of Nardelli's sweeping move to reshape Home Depot, the world's third-largest retailer, into a more centralized organization. That may be an untrendy idea in management circles, but