Marcus: Home Depot needs to look forward on Home Services

Jan

Marcus: Home Depot needs to look forward

posted by admin in Home Depot

The Home Depot Inc. co-founder Bernie Marcus said in a speech in Atlanta on Monday the company needs to look forward rather than worry about mistakes its made in recent years.

Speaking to the Rotary Club of Atlanta, Marcus said he spends more time thinking about where Home Depot is going to be five years from now than where the company was, a reference to its leadership under controversial CEO Bob Nardelli, who left the company in January and is now running auto giant Chrysler.

They have to worry about whats going to come down the pike, Marcus said of Home Depot.

Companies make mistakes, he said. I cannot tell you the mistakes I made as CEO. Marcus called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which was passed by Congress after corporate scandals such as Enron, one of the worst laws ever perpetrated on the American people and one of the great disasters of all time.

When I was the CEO of Home Depot, he said, if I had the chance to go to jail for every decision I made, I would be serving in maximum security, a comment that drew laughter from the audience. You know, we took risks. Every time we opened a store it was a risk for crying out loud. We opened stores when we didnt have enough money in the bank to pay for the ones that we had. But we took the risks because if you dont risk you dont get rewards.

Marcus said the culture at Home Depot was the greatest culture in America of any retail company, bar none. I will you that without a question. We lost some of that culture. And that is what [current CEO] Frank Blake is now trying to do, to get that culture back. Hes working to get people to feel good about themselves, to feel good about what they do for a living.

Home Depot culture was to make people walking in the door with a problem walk out feeling good about what happened. The company said we have the answer.

And that was the whole philosophy, Marcus said. And people felt good about us. And we lost some of that in the last few years. Thats what we lost. And so were bringing that back.

This is the greatest company in the world, without a question, he added. If theres a hurricane, if theres a tornado, you know that Home Depot is going to be there for those people. That had never changed, it will never change, because all of our people are acclimated to do whats right. So there are parts of our culture that stayed and parts of our culture that need to be reinforced.

So Im looking forward to whats going to happen in the future. I think Frank Blake has got the stuff, I think hes got the ability. What we did wrong in the past few years, we now know how to make it right.

Tags: anc, company, Home Depot, lt, Stores, trove