Home Depot's Blueprint for Culture Change

Ram Charan April 2006 Issue Reprint # R0604C
Harvard Business Review

Abstract:What could be harder than turning around a seemingly wildly successful company by imposing a centralized framework on a heretofore radically decentralized, antiestablishment, free-spirited organization? That was the challenge GE alumnus Robert Nardelli faced when he abruptly succeeded Home Depot's popular founders, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank, as the top executive in December 2000.

Talk about a shock: No one expected Marcus and Blank, both in their 50s, to leave. And, as Nardelli himself acknowledges, the last thing anyone wanted was an outsider who would "GE-ize their company and culture." But despite its glossy high-growth exterior, Home Depot was standing on shaky financial footings.

Rapid expansion had stretched cash flow, inventory turns, profits, and store manager ranks thin. Each store's vaunted independence was making the company as a whole highly inflexible, unable to take advantage of economies of scale. What so effectively got Home Depot from zero to $50 billion in sales wasn't going to get it to the next $50 billion. The story of the vision, strategy, and leadership skills Nardelli used to move Home Depot to the next level has been told. But vision, strategy, and leadership alone--while necessary--are not enough.

Typically, culture change is unsystematic and, when it works, is based on the charisma of the person leading the change, Ram Charan says. "But Home Depot shows--in perhaps the best example I have seen in my 30-year career--that a cultural transition can be achieved systematically."

In this article, Charan lays out the panoply of tools that, wielded in a coordinated and systematic fashion, enabled Home Depot to get a grip on its freewheeling culture so that the company could reap--and sustain--the advantages inherent in its size. Many an up-and-coming company would do well to look to this model to gain similar advantage when the time comes to exchange the thrill of entrepreneurial spirit for the strength of established power.