Word: nardelli
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...Nardelli's moves to introduce elements of GE's numbers-oriented processes, along with a new slate of top executives, ruffled feathers in Atlanta's clubby business community. "No question about it," says ex-CEO Blank, who is still active with Home Depot's charitable work in Atlanta. "There was a shift in orientation and culture. Some felt comfortable with that, some didn't." Blank says Nardelli's appointment was the first real management change in a company that was still essentially run like a family business. Taylor says Nardelli's appointment was "as if my mother had come home...
That strategy served him well in many jobs, from baling hay to assembling refrigerators. But in the most important test of his life, sheer doggedness wasn't enough. The son of a GE factory worker, Nardelli, 56, had spent close to 30 years at that company trying to prove himself as CEO material. In November 2000 he lost a two-year, three-way contest to succeed Jack Welch. "To say I wasn't disappointed would be lying," Nardelli says. "You don't train to come in second." Nardelli bounced back to become CEO of Home Depot, a company half...
...succession race at GE was grueling and public. Nardelli, who has the forceful bearing of an offensive lineman, has compared it to playing in the Super Bowl--"the last two minutes for two years." He lobbied Welch for the chance to run his own unit, then took GE's weakest business--making electricity-generation equipment--and quadrupled its sales. But Jeff Immelt, who was known for his polish and intellect and ran GE's cutting-edge medical-systems business, won the top job. The other contender, Jim McNerney at GE Aircraft Engines, entertained an offer from 3M before the race...
...When Nardelli moved with his wife and four children from upstate New York to Home Depot's Atlanta headquarters, the home-improvement retailer was going through a rough patch of its own. Its co-founder and second CEO, Arthur Blank, was under pressure to leave; the company had added stores more quickly than it could properly manage, and comparable-store sales, the crucial measure of a retail chain's organic growth through existing stores, had been declining for eight quarters. Home Depot was expanding so quickly that many executives saw nothing wrong. "You had people who were enormously proud...
...Nardelli found a company that made decisions based on emotion rather than data and that desperately needed direction. He centralized management and introduced some Jack Welch--style discipline. Before he arrived, stores were not even connected by email. One resulting inefficiency: individual stores had tried myriad ways to keep plants in the garden sections watered properly, but "no one could tell you what worked and what didn't work," Blake says. Now several outlets are methodically testing solutions...