| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JUNE 28, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
Home Truths BUILT FROM SCRATCH By Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank with Bob Andelman Times Business 332pp $24.95 From the get-go, it's clear that Built from Scratch isn't your standard executive memoir, full of self-serving homilies. That's because Home Depot Inc. was never your standard faceless conglomerate. In the introduction, co-founders Bernard Marcus and Arthur M. Blank sum up their prospects this way: ''Take two Jews who have just been fired, add an Irishman who just walked away from a bankruptcy and an Italian running a no-name investment banking firm. Add--then subtract--Ross Perot. Lease space from a shrinking discount chain, fill a space the size of a football field full of hardware (and a few hundred empty boxes) and you've got a company. At least that's the way we did it.'' And did it well, building a $30 billion hardware giant that not only came to dominate its own sector but also inspired a new breed of other ''big box'' merchants in electronics, furnishings, and even pet supplies. Together, they redefined retailing over the past decade. If you're looking for a Harvard business school case study of postmodern retailing, this isn't it. In alternating chapters, the founders take turns providing anecdotal accounts of the blood, sweat, shrewd tactics, and dumb luck that turned Home Depot from a gleam in Marcus' eye into the first word in hardware. Serious students can skip to Chapter 13, ''How We Manage,'' where Blank lays out the chain's 14 core principles. Or they might pick up a copy of Chris Roush's Inside Home Depot (McGraw-Hill, 266 pp, $24.95), an unauthorized corporate biography that, while lacking access to Marcus and Blank, nonetheless offers a credible analysis. Nor is Built from Scratch an unbiased account. There is scant mention of some of the unsettling matters that have dogged the company, such as recurring sexual-harassment suits. On the other hand, readers get a candid, insidey version of other events. Marcus, who as chairman has handed day-to-day matters over to Blank, clearly saw this as a chance to settle a lifetime of scores. For example, Marcus lambastes Sandy Sigoloff, corporate boss of Handy Dan Home Improvement Centers, for the cruel way he once fired the authors. He also dishes the dirt on the many prominent corporations and investors who passed up a chance to take an early stake in Home Depot, including Bowater, Hechinger, Sears, and Ross Perot--who backed out of a $2 million investment that today would be worth $58 billion. He tweaks suppliers such as 3M and paint company Wagner for their reluctance to sell to Home Depot in the early years. And Marcus recalls how, fed up with General Electric Co.'s inability to keep Home Depot stocked with light bulbs, he canceled GE's account in a face-to-face meeting with John F. Welch. ''You can help put a man on the moon,'' Marcus fumed, ''but you can't get a 60-watt bulb in our stores.'' Hey, how many other CEOs would have the guts to say that to Jack Welch--and then print it? BY DEAN FOUST _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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