Inside Home Depot

Rating:
Summary: what a joke
Review: Although I'm not an HD fanatic or investor, I found this book a good account of what makes this company tick. Given that it was done without the founders' cooperation, that is an even more amazing feat. I disagree that the book reads poorly; on the contrary, I found it an quick read, well organized and on point. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A good behind-the-scenes objective take on HD
Review: Although I'm not an HD fanatic or investor, I found this book a good account of what makes this company tick. Given that it was done without the founders' cooperation, that is an even more amazing feat. I disagree that the book reads poorly; on the contrary, I found it an quick read, well organized and on point. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, uncensored look at Home Depot
Review: First-time author and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Chris Roush of Bloomberg News in Atlanta writes of how one company revolutionized an industry through the relentless pursuit of growth. "Inside Home Depot" is an unauthorized, behind-the-scenes look at the most successful retailer to come along since Wal-Mart. A Wal-Mart executive even admits in Roush's book that "Home Depot is the best-managed retail company in America, ours included." The company's founder, Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus, say that values like respect among all people, excellent customer service, and giving back to the community have made Home Depot successful. With nearly $90 billion in sales in 1998, Home Depot has become one of the world's biggest retailers in less than 20 years by focusing on customer service, treating employees like family, and relentless pursuit of growth. I learned everything I ever wanted to know about Home Depot -- and more. Roush takes the reader through Home Depot's "boot camp" training class for new employees. Instead of greeting customers with "Hi, how are you doing?" they are told to meet customers with the greeting of "What are you building today?" The book makes interesting reading for the Home Depot shooper who is awed by the success of this innovative store. And for up-and-coming businesses, there are lessons for success that can be learned from the Home Depot example. Home Depot author Chris Roush became an expert on the inside operations of Home Depot while a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution where he also covered Coca-Cola and Home Depot, as well as the entire retail industry. In 1993, his reporting on consumer issues won him a Pulitzer Prize nomination while he was at The Tampa Tribune. He was nominated for the Livingston Award by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for his reporting on the business scene. Roush also worked for Business Week and The Sarasota Herald-Tribune. -- Ed Williams Department of Journalism Auburn University Auburn, Ala.

Rating:
Summary: Blatant pandering to the folks at Home Depot
Review: Mr. Roush's "uncensored" book might as well have been written by Mr.'s Marcus and Blank, the founders of Home Depot. Uncensored and unbiased books do not have a segment at the end of each chapter that recaps how Home Depot is an example for all of us.

Granted, Home Depot has been successful, but this is a 266 page advertisement.

It is obvious that Mr. Roush's journalistic judgment is clouded when he addresses the allegations of discrimination against women and when he discusses how Home Depot rolls into a small community and puts small Mom and Pop operations out of business.

He had the opportunity to critically analyze Home Depots "good ole boy" network - and he didn't. And, when he's done, he all but says that the small hardware store owner deserves to be put out of business.

Save yourself the cost of this book. The Sunday paper Home Depot advertisements are just as insightful and unbiased - and are a lot cheaper.

Rating:
Summary: Okay as a rough draft, but needs a lot more work.
Review: This is a reasonably good book but sort of skirts around the Big Point in the Home Depot story. The Big Point is not that HD 'revolutionized an industry', but rather that it is one of the chief players in the creation and growth of that industry. The do-it-yourself phenomenon is nothing new in the world. Farmers and homeowners and small businesses have been expanding their buildings and fixing their plumbing for centuries. What Home Depot and its imitators have done is to institutionalize the servicing of the do-it-yourself class and in so doing, enabled it to grow exponentially. Do-it-yourselfing was not an industry 30 years ago. It was just something ambitious or cash-strapped people did because they couldn't afford to hire the companies who did that sort of work. It was hard because they had to pay retail and they had to go to twenty different retailers to get supplies. When Home Depot put everything under one roof and gave everything the lowest possible price, the floodgates were opened and all the pent-up demand fueled the Depot's stunning rise.

Chris Roush has all the facts essentially right, but his writing is deficient. The subtitle claims HD 'revolutionized an industry through the relentless pursuit of growth'. But then, what company does not relentlessly pursue growth? Does the CEO of Sears tell his managers, 'Okay, people, we've had a pretty good quarter so far, so we don't have to try to grow any more for awhile.' No. Every company relentlessly pursues growth. That's what it means to be a company in business to make money. What separates HD from the Sears-Roebucks of this world is the growth strategy in general, and pricing strategy in particular. Sears puts on their products the highest price possible short of making customers walk out of the store in outrage. Home Depot sets its prices at the lowest possible point where they can still make a profit. What separate HD from retailers like K-Mart is quality. You can find low prices in a K-Mart, but all too often you find out a week or a month later why the prices were cheap: the merchandise was cheap. Home Depot sells top quality stuff as cheaply as they can while still making a profit.

Roush goes on and on about HD's customer service, but really doesn't come right out and say what is meant by customer service. Is it having a clerk hovering over you every moment like in the department stores of old? Is it having a fawning senior citizen foisting microwaveable tidbits on you like in a Safeway or greeting you at the entrance to a WalMart? No, Home Depot customer service is something useful. It's having someone with a brain within shouting distance at all times, someone in lumber who knows the difference between MDF and CDX, someone in tools who knows a collet from a mandrel. You might have to get them off a forklift or off their cell phone, but when you do, odds are they'll know what they are talking about and where it is. Just the other day I asked a woman where to find dielectric unions. She told me, without hesitation, 'Aisle 5, on the left, halfway to the back'. And that's exactly where they were. I've had that same experience many times in Home Depot. But that's not the way it works in Builder's Square or Home Base.

To make this a better book in future editions, Roush ought to get a firmer grasp of who his readership is. Who the hell wants to read 'Management Lessons' at the end of every chapter? Is this a textbook or a real book? Why not let Cliff Notes do a simplistic summary in a separate volume? Is this a work of history or an infomercial? If it's the former, then drop cheerleader chapter titles like 'Customer Service is Job No. 1'. Find an editor who can weed out all the flabby writing. Someone, for instance, should have told Roush that he used the meaningless filler phrase 'to be sure' over a dozen times. Someone should have pointed out shoddy sentences like this one on page 192: 'In Europe, Inglis received a green light in 1994 to enter Europe'.

Maybe Roush, with his on-again/off-again journalistic objectivity, can't always to distinguish right from wrong or good from bad. He doles out a lot of treacle about Home Depot's owners helping the victims of the Oklahoma bombing, and trying to forge peace in the Middle East, and being good corporate citizens in a variety of ways-- then writes the following sentence about a government that publicly murdered thousands of its own citizens in 1989 and keeps millions more in concentration camps to this day: 'Having the Chinese government as a partner was also appealing' (p.201). I would guess that a capitalist like Marcus or Blank would find a partner like the government of China about as appealing as genital herpes, and that's why there are no Home Depots in China. Of course, maybe that will change. Lots of American companies did good business in Iran in the Seventies and Germany in the Thirties.

Rating:
Summary: what a joke
Review: This is obviously just the work of a home depot corporate hack. Home despot has a reputation for one thing: lousy, rude, and insulting service. While contractors can deal with this, the home consumer always leaves Home despot frustrated and unhappy.

I'm sure Enron executives could write books on how ethical, enlightened and customer friendly Enron is, too. That doesn't mean anyone should waste a nickel or a minute reading them.