Reframing Home Depot

Bleeding Orange Blood

            The Home Depot world ended with the coronation of Jeff Immelt, one of the three carefully groomed successors to the throne at General Electric.  That was the day Robert Nardelli, a losing heir-apparent at GE, became the first outside CEO of The Home Depot. Over the following four years Nardelli fought and hacked his way through the jungle of this organic, home-grown organization, imposing order on the chaos, removing overlapping jurisdictions, razing personal fiefdoms and implementing a rigorous system of accountability, compliance, and control.    Thousands of orange-blooded store associates and hundreds of corporate personnel, including Executive Vice Presidents, fell victim to the carnage.  Customers fled the stores in droves, sales revenues plummeted, the stock price quickly hit a 20-year low, and stayed there.  By the time Bob Nardelli was forcibly removed from his position, he had destroyed Home Depot’s fervent, “can-do,” customer-focused, iconic culture. This paper analyzes the organizational culture of the world’s largest home-improvement retailer through the lens of Bolman and Deal’s book, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership, and from the perspective of someone who survived the Nardelli pogrom.