The Tim Ferriss Show - #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake

Episode Date: March 15, 2018

Frank Blake (@frankblake) served as chairman and CEO of The Home Depot from January 2007 to May 2014, and then as chairman through January of 2015. He previously served as deputy secretary for the US Department of Energy. Prior to that, he served in a wide variety of executive roles at General Electric.Frank's public sector experience includes having served as general counsel for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), deputy counsel to Vice President George H.W. Bush, and law clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.Frank serves on the board of directors for the Georgia Aquarium, Proctor & Gamble, Macy's, and is currently serving as board chairman of Delta and Grady Memorial Hospital. He holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and a jurisprudence degree from Columbia University School of Law.Frank also produces a short-form podcast called Crazy Good Turns, which tells inspiring stories about amazing people who do things for others. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss a book that inspired both of us, advice from Jack Welch, the art of customer service, "productive conflict," and much, much more. Enjoy!This episode is brought to you by Shure, makers of the SRH1540 Premium Closed-Back Headphones. These headphones feature an expansive soundstage with clear, extended highs and warm bass. They are made with aluminum alloy and carbon fiber construction for a lightweight and durable design, and Alcantara ear pads for maximum sound isolation and comfort.Go to shure.com/tim and use the coupon code TIM at checkout to save $100 on these phenomenal, comfortable headphones. The offer is only valid through April 2018!This podcast is also brought to you by WordPress, my go-to platform for 24/7-supported, zero downtime blogging, writing online, creating websites -- everything! I love it to bits, and the lead developer, Matt Mullenweg, has appeared on this podcast many times.Whether for personal use or business, you're in good company with WordPress -- used by The New Yorker, Jay Z, FiveThirtyEight, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, and Time, just to name a few. A source at Google told me that WordPress offers "the best out-of-the-box SEO imaginable," which is probably why it runs nearly 30% of the Internet. Go to WordPress.com/Tim to get 15% off your website today!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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which is mind-blowing when you consider it. And plans start at just $4 per month. Listeners of this podcast can receive 15% off any new plan purchase. So go to wordpress.com forward slash Tim to create your website and find the plan that's right for you. That's wordpress.com forward slash Tim for 15% off a brand new website. Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss. And welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to tease out the habits, routines, tactics you can use from world-class performers of all different types,

including business, military, chess, anything and everything imaginable. And there are patterns. The guest today is Frank Blake, at Frank Blake on Twitter. Frank served as chairman and CEO of the Home Depot from January 2007 through November 2014, and then as chairman through January of 2015. Frank joined the Home Depot in 2002 as executive vice president, business development, and corporate operations. He previously served as deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy. Prior to that, he served in a variety, and I do mean wide variety, of executive roles

at General Electric. And we do have some great, great stories related to lessons learned from Jack Welch, as a side note, including Senior Vice President, Corporate Business Development. And under that umbrella, he did just about everything imaginable. He's an expert of mergers and acquisitions and much, much more. But that's not it. Frank's public sector experience includes having served as general counsel for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, deputy counsel to Vice President George Bush, and law clerk to Justice Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court. He serves on the board of directors for the Georgia Aquarium, Procter & Gamble, Macy's, and is currently serving as chairman of the Delta and Grady Hospital boards.

Additionally, he sits on the board of trustees at Agnes Scott College. He holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard and a jurisprudence degree from Columbia University School of Law. He is a very, very entertaining guy, has fantastic stories, and also a lot of takeaways that you can apply. He also has a podcast, which is short form, 25 minutes. So if you want to scratch that itch, check out crazygoodturns.org and the description. We tell inspiring stories about people who do amazing things for others. There are some fantastic episodes, so I encourage you to check that out.

And without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with the ever-fascinating and very, very effective Frank Blake. Frank, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. Thank you. I am so thrilled to have you here to help me solve the riddles of life. And I thought I would start with maybe some common ground. And it relates to a book called Built to Scratch.

So the background, personally speaking, is that Built to Scratch, along with a few other books, have traveled with me for more than 30 years now. Wow. So they helped set me on my first entrepreneurial journey step and have traveled from house to house, apartment to apartment, country to country ever since. And in the course of doing research, I had read that when you became the CEO of Home Depot, that you had read passages from Built to Scratch. And I was curious if you recalled any of that, why you chose to do that, if you could walk us through it. That would be fantastic.

First, your research is great. Absolutely right. That's very exciting that the book is important to you. As you'll hear, it's hugely important to me. First, the book is the story of Home Depot. It was written by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank and about Bernie and Arthur and Ken Langone and their founding of Home Depot. It's one of the great entrepreneurial stories of our century, of our times, because Bernie and Arthur had been fired from their prior job. Ken Langone said to them when they got fired, you just got hit by a golden horseshoe in the ass.

You're so lucky. And then they went and established the Home Depot, not only because it's the story of the founding of the Home Depot, but also because of my start as the CEO of Home Depot. I did not have a background that would lead anyone to think that I'd ever be the CEO of the Home Depot. In fact, when the board called me and said, we want you to be the CEO, I said, you ought to take a day and think about this. Because while I had been at Home Depot for a few years, I had not been really doing a lot of the retail work. I'd been doing M&A activity and real estate and that kind of thing. And I said, you ought to spend a day, think about it, and think about hiring a real retailer. And I need to think about it. Obviously, they called back at the end of the day. They still offered me the job.

I obviously took the job. But I can honestly say that a nanosecond before the call, I was not thinking, I'm going to be the CEO of this company. There were no moments of driving along in the dark of night thinking, oh, what would I do if I were running this place? I was completely unprepared. And then, like a lot of retailers, we have a way of communicating to our associates. At the time, Home Depot had around 350,000 associates. We have little TVs that we beam in messages to the break rooms. And I have to go and address the 350,000 associates being singularly unprepared. At the time, my son, Home Depot has a program of returning veterans, giving them jobs in the store. My son was a returning Iraq veteran, Iraqi War veteran, had come back, had been an assistant store manager, was now a store manager at Home Depot.

And so I gave him a call. I said, Frank, he's the same name as I. I said, Frank, do you have any thoughts on what I should say? And first he said, wow, good luck. And then the second thing he said was, I don't know what you should say, but I can tell you how I start every store meeting in my store. I said, great, what do you do? And he said, I take Bill from scratch and I read from it.

I'll read a passage from it. And I go, this is brilliant. And so I pick up the book, I flip madly through it to find something that I think is relevant. And in the book, they talk about the inverted pyramid and a leadership concept where the CEO is at the bottom and the customers and the frontline associates are at the top. And so I use that reading from built from scratch and then inverted pyramid is my first communication to our associates. And then for the next eight years as CEO, I spent time figuring out what does that actually mean? How do you lead from an inverted pyramid

perspective? And what are the leadership lessons you pull from that. So yes, a hugely important book. It's a great book. Unfortunately, it's out of print, but I'm sure I can get it for anybody who wants it. Yeah, maybe we can get the publisher to do it in print. That would be great. I'll give them a heads up when this is going to land. Yeah, exactly. So I'd like to start right in the middle of the action, kind of in media rest with something like that, and then rewind the clock. So if we go back to your childhood, could you tell us a bit about where you grew up and how you would describe your childhood? I grew up right outside of Boston, Massachusetts, a family of five. I was the fourth of five.

Unfortunately, my three older siblings have died. My mom, though, just had her 100th birthday and still lives in the house I grew up in. Had a great, very family oriented experience growing up. Very close family. And we have a lot of relatives in the area. So New England's sort of home still. What did your mom do for her 100th birthday? So we had a big party. And we had lots of relatives, lots of her friends. She's the kind of person who, if you mention any name, she will know exactly what that person's father did, what their sister did. She'll have a back story that will go on for 15 or 20 minutes. She works the phone constantly. She did that growing up, and she's done that even to the age of 100.

She's sharp as a tack. Wow, so factual recall. Yeah, and very storytelling. So you go, wow, I had no idea that there was that much interesting going on in their life. You know, they had a twin sister and the twin sister ran away with the grocery man. And, you know, it was just all that kind of detail. Fascinating stuff. What did you think you were going to grow up to be when you were in, say, high school or when you were younger? I was interested in politics. So I worked on campaigns. When I got out of college,

I worked in the state legislature in Massachusetts. After I went to law school, I then ended up in Washington, D.C. I had a very traditional Washington, D.C. lawyer government career, moved back and forth from private practice and into the government. So politics fascinated me. I was interested in politics. Why did it fascinate you?

What led to that? Or what about it? I think you start by the issues are so interesting. You think you can impact people's lives. Power is a fascinating thing. And so politics is a source of power and it's fascinating because of it. Did you experience conversations

about politics over the dinner table or how were you introduced to it? Not a bit. Not a bit. No, not a bit. It was entirely um i self-generated i don't know where it came from but it yeah no one else in my family was remotely interested in politics that was my thing so as i was mentioning before we started recording i've had

a hell of a time trying to figure out what path to take with this conversation because you have such an eclectic background. And people will have heard certainly a fair amount of this in the introduction. But I'll just mention a few things and then I'll get to the question. So you have law clerk for Supreme Court Justice, general counsel for GE. I'm skipping a lot. Deputy secretary. Now, do you say deputy secretary of the Department of Energy, or is it better to just say deputy secretary of energy?

Department of Energy. There we go. All right. And then CEO of Home Depot, and then certainly, at least as one of our mutual friends has put it, you are the least retired retired person he knows. I have a lot of friends who are lawyers, loved ones who are lawyers, uh, former lawyers, and they tend to be very, uh,

certainty focused and, uh, averse to entrepreneurship. So how have you, and if this is even accurate, ended up with this combination of very strong legal background and ability to manage amidst uncertainty and combine those two? It's really unusual from my experience, at least. I'm probably an awful lot accidental. So the first part accidental was a group of us set up our own law firm. So there were 12 of us who set up our own law firm, and that was kind of my first experience with entrepreneurial activity. I could say I was singularly bad.

The firm did great. Most of my instincts about how to do it actually looking back are pretty funny because I was wrong. So that was an introduction to entrepreneurial activity. I left Washington to go to GE to be the general counsel of a business in Schenectady, New York. And everybody thought that's the stupidest thing we've ever heard. Why would you leave Washington, a great legal practice, and go to Schenectady? And mostly it was by that time I was kind of sick of politics and sick of Washington. And I was the beneficiary of the way GE did HR. So basically they moved people around every 18 months.

But they never bothered to move the lawyers because, you know, they're not going to bother to move the lawyers. So after about five or six years, I'm the person around the table who sort of knows how the business works. And I've listened to this and I've observed over time. And they offered me a job going on to the business side, and then the rest of it. Being a lawyer is great. Having been a lawyer is even better. So I really enjoyed the business side and found it much, much more fascinating than the legal side.

How did you make the decision, walk us through making the decision to leave the law practice and take the job at GE because that's a scary, or it could be a scary step. And I know certainly looking around myself at my friends who have what most people would consider a successful legal careers, uh, they often pine after these types of changes, but very few of them actually take the leap. So how did you,. So how did you make that decision? There were two things.

The first, just as a scene setter, is it is the case I have never made as a salary more money than I made as a lawyer. So I did more with my draw from the law firm than through to being CEO of the Home Depot. So it was a very good legal practice. The problem with a legal practice after a while that you realize is there's such a disincentive for any kind of efficiency. Right? Somebody comes in with a problem and you go, I know this problem. I can name this tune in three notes. Well, no, actually that's not the business model.

You want to say, oh, boy, that's a complex symphony. That's going to be 3,000 notes. And so the idea of trying to do something that's cumulative rather than billing your time by the hour is really what appealed to me. And Washington's a very closed little culture. And I wanted just to get out of that closed culture. And Schenectady, New York sounded like the far end of the earth. Now, at the time, were you single, married?

Married. You were married. Married. How did you deliver, married? Married. Married. Married. How did you deliver the news, or how did you discuss the possibility of that switch? If you're comfortable saying. Yeah, I don't know that we had a lot of discussion around it, but it was clear that I was not.

I just was becoming increasingly unhappy on the legal side. And while I'm not sure everybody was thrilled, my family wasn't thrilled to be moving to, you know, we lived in Albany, but to be moving to upstate New York, they rode in with it. It gets chilly. I grew up in New York, but on Long Island. But upstate gets chilly for people who haven't been there. Upstate is chilly, and, yeah, it's very chilly.

GE. So GE is another company in addition to Home Depot, even though I've never done anything myself in any industries related to either that is fascinating to me. When did you first meet Jack Welch? Oh, early on. And then I ended up as a direct report for Jack. Jack Welch is, I mean, the founders of Home Depot, Bernie Marcus, Ken Langone, Arthur Blank, they're extraordinary people. Jack Welch is an extraordinary human being. One of the ways I would describe it is I would never take a phone call from him sitting down. The energy just immediately stood up to provide an answer to Jack. And just, I've got a lot of, he was hugely helpful

to me while I was the CEO at Home Depot. Got a lot of stories around Jack. Truly a hero. Yeah, let's get into it. This is a long-form podcast. We have the luxury of time. So this is an arc. So I become CEO of the Home Depot. I think, all right, I'm going to call Jack, and I'm going to ask him for some time and kind of give me CEO 101 lessons, which I did.

And he was very nice. He was down in Florida at the time. I said, Jack, can I spend a day with you and kind of pick your brains? And he said, great. And mind you, I have done hundreds of pitches to Jack in my time at GE. And I prepared so hard for this meeting with him. I could tell you the margin rate of an ant trap. I mean, I was just into all the details, all the numbers.

And I go down, and the first thing he says is um draw me your org chart and we spend a day going through people and it was probably one of the most helpful days of my time because you know and i recommend this for anybody anywhere if you find somebody that you really respect who will ask you questions and then you just listen to what you're saying and in effect he did that uh for me on the organization and the people and then every year i do the same thing i spend a day with jack every single year and this is jumping ahead but i love the story so much. You can jump around. So the eighth year, so my last time, I get to ask the question that's sort of the moron, stupid question that you wouldn't dare ask earlier because you wouldn't be able to get the next meeting with Jack. So I go, okay, Jack, all of the attributes of leadership, if you had to weigh them all and pick one, what is the single most important attribute of leadership? If you had to weigh them all and pick one, what is the single most important attribute of leadership? And his answer shocked me. He said generosity. And I wouldn't have predicted it.

It kind of took me by surprise when he said it. And then when he explained it and explained how as leaders you need to be fueled by the success of others and how that's really got to be the driving force. And I could see that as true for how he ran GE. It made a lot of sense, and it's stuck with me ever since. It was a great lesson. Why was it important in that first meeting that he shifted the focus to the org chart? What happened? What were the questions he asked? What were the important?

So the great questions were, first, how are you organized? Because that tells a lot about what your priorities are. And second, he'd be asking about people and I'd be I'd find myself in some instances kind of making excuses and saying well you know blah blah blah but not really and then he'd just say

I mean did you hear what you just said what are you going to do about it and it wasn't his commentary on these people he didn't even know them but listening to his you know feeding back to me what i was saying and then say hey look you know you're not smart enough to do this on your own so if you're gonna do this and be successful you gotta you gotta get the right team with you so for people who don't know Jack, what would you say he's best known for?

It's something that stuck with me, and I have great respect for Jack, and I've read a lot about him, but I might be getting the details wrong, because it's been a while. I mean, he's had the nickname Neutron Jack. He, I think it was with the bottom 10% of performers in GE were let go on an annual basis. Yeah, annual basis. And was he then asking you about strongest, weakest performers and then asking you why you were keeping

or why the weakest performers were continuing to be employed? So he wasn't doing it on a kind of percentage, tell me who lags and who's ahead. It was more individual by individual, tell me, describe for me their strengths and weaknesses. Go through it. And what I would say, what Jack did that particularly impresses me in retrospect, because it's so hard to do. So I go into GE as a lawyer.

GE is a finance engineering firm. Lawyers are, I mean, you know, GE is a finance engineering firm. Lawyers are not, I mean, you know, we had a great legal team, but still, the lawyers are not at the top of the organizational pecking order. Somehow, Jack got the sense within me that the path to success in the company was actually to disagree with him and be

right. And that's huge because, and he would say this, you know, I'd express, wow, that's so amazing. You know, in retrospect, Jack, that's so amazing. And he'd say, well, I really don't need to pay people to tell me I'm right. I need to pay people who are going to tell me where I'm wrong. But organizations are such echo chambers. And Bernie Marcus gave me a great piece of advice. He gave me tons of pieces of advice that were terrific. But I remember one of them at the start of becoming CEO, Bernie said, okay, let me tell you how this works. You're going to be sitting around a table and you're going to tell a joke and all the folks are going to laugh. And he said, let me tell you, you're not funny. And the point of that is, you know, people are just going to respond to you the way they think you want them to respond. So eliciting the kind of reaction that

Jack did for me, which was, hey, it's okay, actually, to disagree with the boss, you damn well better be right. But it's a good thing to disagree with the boss is huge. So on that point, and I may get the pronunciation wrong. Carol Tomei. Yeah. So at the time, Home Depot's CFO. Yeah. Said that when you arrived, still. Yeah. And this isomei. Yeah. So at the time, Home Depot CFO said that when you arrived still, yeah. And this is a compliment. You invited conflict into the decision making process.

And I'll quote here. This is from a fortune article. We were conflict hesitant. Frank asked a ton of questions that make you say what is working and not working. So this is interesting to me. How do you encourage people and to disagree and elicit the bad news or whatever it might be? How do you do that without also simultaneously or dissipating the fear of getting punished for that? I think it's one of the most important things. So I have a long discussion around what the inverted pyramid means. But one of the things it means is that everything that's important, as the CEO, everything that's important is happening above you. With the customers and the frontline associates and the folks who work in the organization.

So you've got to figure out a way to effectively listen and effectively get them to communicate to you. I learned actually from a board member at Home Depot, and this may be more unique to retail to doing this, but it worked, that the best way to do that is if I was walking in a store and we had a particular project, my comment would be, why isn't Project X x working and then they'd go oh my gosh frank knows that the project isn't working i guess we better say something and so that would actually prompt a conversation while if you said how's everything going in any organization of any size there's only one right answer when the boss says, how's everything going? The answer is, it's going great. You're awesome. Please go. And you need to kind of pull out from

people. You know, every once in a while, somebody would say, why do you say it's not working? It's working great. But more often than not, it would be, oh, well, here's what's not happening, here are the issues. So there are so many pieces of paper, as you can see, and so many questions that I want to ask. And the next one is really closely related to this and something that I think about a lot, and I'll lead into it in a somewhat confusing way. But the Internet is almost all negative feedback. People get punished and attacked. However, if you look at say operant classical conditioning, dog training, mammal

training, human training, positive reinforcement is actually critically important. So this is a quote, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd love to get some examples of how you have celebrated people's successes and wins, whether within Home Depot or elsewhere. And the quote is, I'm a lawyer, lawyers don't celebrate shit. Or actually, furthermore, the only way people know what you want is that you celebrate when they get it right.

I'm a lawyer. Lawyers don't celebrate shit. So what are concrete examples of how you would do that? That was actually one of my biggest learnings of the time as CEO was the importance of celebration. In fact, what I tell people now is every business person knows the saying that you get what you measure. I'd say there's an important, maybe even more important corollary, you get what you celebrate. People, just as you say, they reference off of the stories. They reference off of when you reward someone and make a point of it. That actually sticks in the mind long after other things have forgotten.

And at Depot, we did a lot. In fact, spent a lot of time on this. Personally, I would spend every Sunday afternoon writing notes to hourly associates. So for us, customer service was what we were after. Customer service is such a vague, right, such a vague term. And I would write 100 to 200 notes every Sunday. And we had a whole process for rolling up, you know, the Joan, Jane, Jack did blank. And it would roll up from the store to the district to the region.

And I would write notes saying, Dear Joe or Jane. And it wouldn't just be, You're awesome. Thank you very much, Frank. It would be, I heard you did blank. And I'd write out what it was. Thank you very much. And send the note out and sign my name. And there's a long, I have a long thing about note writing

and why note writing is so important. Let's get into it. So I wondered about the power of that, but early on I was walking a store, and an associate came up to me and said, gee, would you mind rewriting the note that you sent me? And I said, no, sure, no problem, but why? And he said, well, we were all convinced

that it was a RoboPen note, and so we put it underwater, and it leaked, it ran, and so would you write me another one? People respond to being recognized. I learned this from, so early in my career, I worked for George Bush's dad when he was vice president. And it's a great thing to work for. I mean, he's a wonderful human being. Working for the vice president is great because it's a very small staff,

so you can actually see what he does. And at the time, so this is 1981, ages and ages ago, no computers, but he would come into the office and type out notes. And you knew that he was typing the notes because, you know, the E would be slightly off and the B white out. But as a staff member, when you got a note from the vice president, you know, you were walking on water. I mean, you just felt like everything was great.

And I believe that we learn more from those positive stories and recognition than anything else. In addition, I mean, the notes were kind of my thing, but we also did a video every single week of great customer service and we put it in that same break room TV. And you'd videotaped the actual, the associates who were being highlighted. We'd retell the story. We'd retell the story with the associates. I mean, so there'd be one of these every single week. We did little books of great associate customer service stories. If you go into stores, you'll see people with badges and recognition. And you just don't communicate.

You can write a memo to someone and think it gets down through an organization, but it doesn't. It's when you pull people out and say, here, this is what this person did that was extraordinary. You tell a story around it, and everyone remembers that story. That person's thrilled, and everybody else is going, I want a story told about me, too. I'm doing that kind of stuff as well. And it builds on itself. So if you have, I think the number that you mentioned was 350,000 or a few hundred thousand. No, 350,000. And now they're over 400. Right. So if you have 350,000 associates and you're doing this every week, what are the check boxes or the process for selecting those 200? I'd love to learn more about that.

Because I, I no doubt there are people listening to this. I know there are people listening to this who run very large organizations and that that's, that's going to be one of the questions top of mind, I would imagine. So the great thing about it is you take some, you take that.

So you say, Frank wants to send a note out. Then this is where having an organization is great because then you say, okay, here's how we're going to do it. The stores are going to submit stories of great customer service and the store will submit that to the district and the district will take its best stories and the district's best stories go to the regions and then the regions all submit them to me. So beyond the note writing itself, there's actually a process for recognition. So I hope the better store managers were recognizing every single story that they forwarded on to the district and were making a celebration with their associates in that store.

Same with the districts and same with the region so that it reinforced itself. So it's not just the one note. It's the entire process. It's why, as I say, people just should spend time thinking about what they're recognizing and celebrating. They should do it intentionally. They should have a process around it. They should do it consistently because, you know, we talk a lot about company culture, but that's what really sets the culture. It's what everybody is saying. You want to know, you want to see the story.

You want to see what this looks like. This is what it looks like. And so if these letters are going out and people want to receive a letter, they want to be in the video, what were the criteria for good stories? In other words, these various, say, district managers and so on could have their subjective views of what makes a good customer service story, but did you give them any guidelines at all? I didn't, i'd be honest i i mean customers i mean that's the important thing about customer service is um it takes lots of different forms right but um what we weren't looking for is and it's not like this isn't important but we weren't looking for the story of the cashier who stopped the robber. I mean, so those are important stories,

but some companies are more focused on shrink prevention and things like that. We're focused on customer service. And we had lots of different, I mean, just emotionally powerful people helping other people in the store. Phenomenal, phenomenally strong stories. But no, didn't set any guidelines. So you mentioned stopping the bankrupt, not the bankruptcy, but the theft not being a very good example. And what this brings to mind for me is I think it was Andy Grove of Intel.

I might be getting this wrong. I'm sure someone on the internet will correct me if I am. But that for every metric they decided to measure, which was a positive indicator for the company, Andy would insist that they identify the perverse incentive or correlating metric that they should measure for side effects. And so you could, I mean, I'm reaching a little bit here, but you could see if someone says, of course this is exaggerated, but oh my God, I could get in the video if I stop a robbery. Like who could I hire to simulate a robbery? And I'll let my buddy go, but I'll put up a good fight and get in the video. You mentioned what you celebrate, or I'm sorry, let me get this right. You just wrote it down.

But effectively, you get what you measure, you get what you celebrate. Right. What were some of the, when you took the rands, what were some of the metrics that you focused on or that the organization focused on? Yeah. So every retailer, I mean, now it's commonplace, but you look at what's called net promoter score. But that, I mean, if that's an accurate Andy Grove quote, I entirely agree with it because…

It's definitely a quote from someone definitely a quote from someone in a right quote because every single metric does have a germ of a problem in it so you have to be careful i mean we would measure net promoter score you know how happy the customers are in the store but it's always a reminder that the dominant measure is how are we doing on sales and profitability. So as you move down below that on the metric side, you have to be very careful. And how did you measure sales? There are many different ways to doing it or revenue. You have revenue per square foot you have say uh profit or revenue or net income whatever it might be per employee you have many different approaches

you could take were there any that were more important than others no i mean we our stores uh while they're very idiosyncratic within the box uh they're very similar. And we would look at, so we didn't have to get very sophisticated about, on the store side, on revenue per square foot. The merchandising side, you do more of that because you want to say, what's our return on the space we're allocating to that merchandise? See, you mentioned at least once, maybe a few times, how you seemed to be the accidental CEO, didn't expect to be asked to be CEO.

How did they explain it? Or if they didn't, I'm sure they probably said something. Why were you asked to be CEO? Well, in the end, you need to ask Ken Langone, who is the lead director and the other directors of Home Depot at the time. I've never really spent time asking them why. I think they had seen a lot of me because I was in charge of deals. And we did a lot of M&A transactions. That was as the SVp the senior vice president of corporate business development or oh no that was it that was at uh ge well i did deals so my the

job i ended up with at ge was uh doing m&a the job i was uh doing at home depot was doing m&a we went out and we bought uh a whole series of companies that were called at the time Home Depot Supply that was the largest commercial industrial distributor in the country. But I pitched those deals to the board, so they saw me a lot. And then the first thing I did when I became CEO is that we need to sell this business. And we sold the business. Why did you have to sell the business? Or why did you recommend that they sell the business?

So the dominant reason for me personally was, and I think that this was organizationally right, but I know it was right for me individually, was saying to be the best retailer in any space requires 110% of the effort. For me, to be the best leader of a retailer is 110% plus of effort. No chance that I can also say, oh, and here's this other business, this great commercial industrial distribution business. I can be the best CEO in that space too. Just knew that was not going to be possible. And so we said, we need to sell. Is that what you said to convince the board that it was a good idea? Pretty much. Yeah. Pretty much.

Yeah. Yeah. And it was, I don't think I made it that personal. Right. I think I said, look, because the company, we'd been losing market share. We were trailing our principal competitor. I said, this is, we've got to be all eyes on the retail business, and we've got to get rid of everything that's a distraction to the retail business.

Plus, at the time, so I took over right at the start of 2007, and the housing crisis was, by that point, the clouds were fairly obvious obvious and so we knew we had to make some dramatic changes because things were going to go downhill fast and they went even more downhill and faster than we anticipated i bought a house in late 2007 talk about good timing there you go there you go there you go in san jose aka man jose cal California, but that's a separate story. Uh, the decision to divest of, I guess, HD supply. Yep.

And I may be misattributing, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but it, it is also makes me think of Jack Welch. If I'm getting this right, which is, did he not want every division or product line or company to be either number one or number two in its category?

He famously had that as an objective. That did not drive that decision because Home Depot Supply was number one. Right. Got it. So it's more a matter of focus. So it was a matter of focus. And in fact, my commentary was, there are some unique individuals like Jack who can run a conglomerate, and I would be deep, deep into the details of the business I worked at in GE, and Jack would still ask questions to me that I'd just slap my head and go, oh my God, what a great question. Why didn't I think of that? I knew not me. I mean, it would take, it would take all, as I said, just running a conglomerate is a, is a big, big challenge and not one. I knew I couldn't do that. So you mentioned, well, we've, we've talked a bit about your legal background

and, uh, someone compared you at one point, Darwin Smith, the attorney turned CEO at Kimberly Clark, uh, because of how lawyers are trained in conflict, how to navigate deeper issues, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, I've also noticed that for instance, if I can't find a proofreader who is a professional writer, I will find a proofreader who is a professional writer, I will ask one of my friends who is a lawyer because they're very good. They're not professional proofreaders per se for the type of writing that I do, but they're very good at spotting language that is nebulous words that shouldn't be there. How did your legal training help you for what came later? And it might be a chicken and the egg thing. I mean, it could be what helped you to be a good lawyer,

but what about those life experiences or that training helped you later or hurt? I think, I think the part of, so the hurt is easier. So we can start there. Yeah. So the,

so the, the things that you, I kind of had to hike away from are, for lawyers, everything is great, right? And you can chew over decisions for a long time, and it's very complex and full of ambiguity. If you're leading 350,000 people strong, and you're coming out out and your statements are in paragraphs. I mean, just you've lost it right from the start. So driving for simple, portable messages that just, you know, screw the ambiguity. That is essential.

I actually think it's essential regardless of whether it's 350,000 people or three people. So that you kind of have to train away from. The part that's probably good is you're trained to worry. I mean, lawyers are trained. I always felt like law school trains you to worry about things that no normal human being would worry about. And so there is a value as a CEO to worry, but you got to kind of internalize that as much as possible. Because the other part of, you have to get rid of that worry. Colin Powell has a great expression I deeply believe in, which is optimism is a force multiplier.

And in any organization, you've got to, and this was particularly true as things were grim, you've got to drive to the optimistic side. You can't be going, this really could turn out badly. But I think internally that's helpful, to worry, to be thinking around the corner, to be thinking what's going to go wrong. Just as you said, get that every metric that you put in place comes with its own little seed of destruction.

Understanding that, being aware of it, don't tell it to anybody else. So, you know, we would, all our stores would have net promoter scores. I wouldn't tell them, oh, here's the fascinating flaw in that metric and why you might not want to be committed to that. We'd just go, this is what we're focused on. We're focused on our net promoter score. I'm sorry. No.

I was going to, I'm going to zoom out, but I want to zoom in for a second just on net promoter score. How did you all measure that? It was by surveys on the receipt in the store. And so you can immediately imagine if, so not to get into the nitty gritty of what's wrong with net promoter scores, but you can imagine one of the things is the more crowded your store is, the more volume your store does, by and large that correlated to a net promoter score that was a little bit lower right if you wanted the highest net promoter score have a store that very few people went to uh right so

one customer per employee per day right exactly and they were thrilled and they take the little you know they give give you the positive feedback but yeah we did it straight off of um straight off of receipts and people typing in and saying whether they're happy or they weren't happy. And then, you know, now on the Internet, obviously, a lot easier. 4C surveys come up all the time. It's also a lot easier to, as you noted, get lost in the seeds of destruction or the noise. Right. get lost in the seeds of destruction or the noise, right? Because if you have a net promoter score also, at least of some types, you can have a selection bias for people who are unhappy, which is super, super tough. But the,

the zooming out I want to do right now and look at what you said about keeping, keeping a lot of that worry and potential downside inside. This is a huge challenge for a lot of founders and CEOs that I know, where they have to really put on the brave face and help everyone march to optimism while keeping any of the concerns they might have inside, or at least not showing it publicly to all the troops. Could you walk us through, if possible, or just describe maybe a period or an instance where you

had a lot of that to keep inside and how you dealt with that because a lot of these CEOs feel really alone they end up in some cases getting health problems it's very very challenging could you give us a maybe an example of how you've contended with that uh the best thing for me uh there's a there's a great saying in retail that now has to be amended because of the internet but the saying in retail is all truth is on the floor of the store so now it's also online but all truth is on the floor of the store um the best vehicle for me to deal with those worries was always spending time in the store. And I would try, I don't think, I didn't do it religiously every week, but I would do dinners with hourly associates whenever I, you know, wherever I was, I tried to do one a week with hourly associates. And you pretty quickly get your problems put in perspective.

And it was hugely valuable to me. And I remember the first one I did was we fly in and I'm sitting around. There's this very nice woman sitting next to me, you know, kind of give or take my age. And I'm complaining about my back. So I, you know, she says, how are you doing? And I say something with my back. Mind you says, how are you doing? And I say something with my back. Mind you, I've flown in on a private plane. And I'm saying, I've got my back problems.

And then I go, how are you? And she said, well, it's funny that you say that about your back problem because three months ago I fractured my spine and I had to be in traction. And it was really difficult when I started working in the store again and I was in a wheelchair you know we have bulky items and they have to get moved and I'm going I'm complaining about the little and then she says and I go wow that's amazing and then she said well that wasn't the really hard part the really hard part was I have a 12 year old developmentally disabled son and I had to bathe I have to bathe him every day and I have a 12-year-old developmentally disabled son, and I have to bathe him every day, and I have to get him in the bath, and that was so difficult when I was in the wheelchair.

The fears and worries kind of melt when you see what people are putting up with every day and doing one foot in front of the other and having a smile and being committed to people around them. And so that gave a sense of perspective that sort of put the earnings per share worries a little bit in farther focus. And they were always great for that. I mean, just amazing. Home Depot and both Bernie and Ken, Arthur as well, the great stories of Home Depot. And why Built from Scratch is such a great book, why it's such a great idea. There's some crazy stories in that book. I mean, they're great. But the underlying thing is people who typically start, I come in, I'm shagging carts in the lot.

Maybe I graduated from high school. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this job. And 80% of our store managers started as hourly associates. Our upper management started as hourly associates. And it's these amazing career stories, wealth generation through starting at the bottom in retail. I was at dinner last week with a friend. This, I think, happens all the time with Bernie and Ken and Arthur. But it was, you know, if you go, boy, there's a bell to ring in life. This guy comes up with up and he's with his daughter and he said,

I just wanted to introduce my daughter to you because I want to introduce her to the person who's making her college possible. And you go, well, I mean, first off, obviously not me, but wow, that's, that is such an awesome story. That story is replicated over and over and over and over again at Home Depot. It was both Bernie and Ken and Arthur always talk about the Home Depot you have your mission statement and all the rest, but what it's really about is wealth

generation for your associates. And it ties back to Jack's comment about leadership. If at the end you could say, wow, these people made their lives and careers from it, that provides a great perspective on the job. After leaving Home Depot, since that time, how have you created a pressure release valve for the worrying or stress? The first great thing about retirement is the anxiety level drops dramatically. So if you were in buds. Every day. The thing about a retail business is on your phone, there are your sales. And the IT organization is saying,

gee, I can give you this by the minute. No, I really don't want it. Excuse me. I don't want it by the minute. So that anxiety of every day. Home Depot just reported its results, and they're great results. Craig Meneeres, the CEO now, is doing a phenomenal job, but it is that every day, every day pressure on delivery that's good to step away from

and good to think about what are some of the other things you want to do in your life and um focus some time elsewhere what else what when it creeps in is there anything that you like to do any particular sports or morning routines or anything that you find helpful for managing your state uh there are lots of things. Because I think your retirement is busier than most people's careers in some respects. I mean, you certainly keep yourself occupied. So I'd be curious to hear what routines or habits

are critical to you. So the habits are very different. Now, I think probably I had a very non, pretty much because of starting without a preset set of notions of what I was going to do at Home Depot. If you ask me what I did at the start of every day as CEO of Home Depot, no, the compare and contrast. Let's do both if you're okay with that. Yeah. And I'm not recommending this. This is not a good tool.

But I started every day reading emails from customers. And I did that because in any large organization, it's really easy to get a false sense from averages and percents. And then you see, wow, we did that badly. And it was a good marker for me of how we were doing and what we needed to focus on. And that kind of management by anecdote is actually pretty powerful. But I would do that for like an hour early in the morning. I have always gotten up really, really early.

What time is early? So I get up about quarter to five, and I'd usually be in the office by six o'clock and start reading emails. Now I don't. I still get up really early. Now instead I start by reading. My wife and I, and this was a habit introduced,

and I'm not, I struggle with the notion of an intentional God. My wife does not. My wife is a strong believer in an intentional God. My wife does not. My wife is a strong believer in an intentional God, and we pray in the morning together. And it was awkward. You know, I'm in New England. That's just, you know, we don't, gosh,

we don't do anything with anyone at that level of intimacy. And that's actually really an interesting habit to have because saying things aloud and hearing what's in her mind and then sort of being forced in yourself, okay, what am I grateful for? What am I seeking help for, is really valuable. So that's a different kind of habit. What is the format?

You don't have to share the specifics unless you're open to doing that, but what is the format of the prayer? How long does it last? And you mentioned maybe some sneak peeks, but I'd love to hear about that because I journal almost every morning. Yeah. And I'm not speaking aloud, but there might be some commonalities. Yeah. No, I suspect.

What is the format that you use? So the format is there's actually a lectionary that tells you what readings. So there are a series of readings. So you do a reading typically from the Old Testament, the Psalms, and the New Testament. It's typically how you go. So we read. And then we pray. And my prayers, I've gotten better at it, you know, because I do think to the extent you write it down and you say things, it kind of gives context. And maybe in some way it makes it more likely to happen.

My prayers have tended to be you know i hope everything works out and boy am i grateful for everything and my wife would be very specific about uh and is very specific about this person needs help uh this is what i'm going to do to try to help this person. My wife, parenthetically, worked for Habitat for Humanity. That was her job. And she goes to Haiti nearly every other, well, every month. For a while, she's gone almost every other week. So she does a lot for other people, but she will mention, here are the people who are in need. So it's really

helpful seeing, okay, that's what she's focused on. And then it teases out for me, what should I be focused on? Who needs help? What should I be doing? So if someone were transcribing your prayers, would there be certain categories that tend to pop up more than others, like somebody who needs help and how I'm going to help them, grateful for X, I need help with X. Are there particular buckets that tend to pop up a lot? It's other people who need help. There's a separate thing of each time kind of naming two things we're grateful for. And what are we grateful for?

And it could be, I'm grateful to be on tim ferris podcast i'm great i'm grateful it's it's uh but it's a it's a good mental exercise to say hey there's an enormous amount of stuff to be grateful for and then there are people who need help and it's um And my wife is a much more powerful prayer than I am. But I'm learning. I'm getting there. I really like that. I don't pray in the morning, although maybe someone would consider what I do a secular prayer perhaps. But I do have a gratitude journal.

And I note three things that I'm grateful for first thing in the morning. And then I have a handful of prompts that take four to five minutes in the a.m. And then I do a review in the p.m., including what am I grateful for that happened today effectively. It's very deceptively powerful. Exactly right. Exactly right. And like you mentioned, or maybe I'm implying or inferring, it also helps to develop the lens through which you view the rest of the day. If you buy a car and then all of a sudden you go out and you see your car everywhere, it's not because everyone went out and copied you and bought your car.

It's because you have that attuned selective attention. It's really, really powerful. And it's a powerful way to get to learn about another person too. So to get that sense of, oh, okay, this is what they're worried about. This is how they think. It's really useful. I really love that it starts with somebody else who needs help and then grateful for in the sense that it's not right off the bat

beginning with your ask. That's really important. You mentioned checking or reading customer email. So I had read on, I think it was consumerist.com, it's probably elsewhere, but you gave out your phone number and email. And I think that this is the line that I found on Consumerist. Use it if you have a persistent problem with Home Depot that hasn't been resolved through normal customer service channels.

Remember to be polite, professional, and to the point. And then there's a phone number extension. You can also email frank-blake at homedepot.com. How on earth do you triage that? Did you get fewer email than expected, fewer phone calls? Did you get deluged? What happens when you do this? A lot.

There are a lot. And we have a team. I mean, I think it was hugely important to do. I did it early on. I still get customer emails, but we set up an executive resolutions team. And I learned the first weekend on the job when I mistakenly answered my phone not thinking and got a customer. Those take a long time to get resolved.

So we have a professional team that goes through those and resolves them. But for me, what was useful was you see patterns and you go, okay, this is what's not going well. This is consistent. It may not be numerically that percentage-wise that high, but if somebody is taking time out of their day to email the CEO saying, this is screwed up, it's worth listening to.

And then associates also knew my email. And they'd send me, hey, this isn't going well. You've got to fix this. You've got to fix that. Whatever. What are some of your favorite interactions, or better put, lessons learned,

tidbits of wisdom received from Bernie Marcus? You said you learned a lot. Wow, a lot. So are there any that come to mind? It could be anything where you're like, wow, that's really useful. All right. The first is, just as I said, about avoiding the echo chamber,

getting outside of the echo chamber. Bernie has a great, I think one of the things that makes Home Depot such a strong culture is that one of Bernie's other early on comments to me was, look, you have a prominent job, but you don't have a significant job. You have a prominent job because you go out and talk to analysts and all the rest of it, but the only significant jobs are the jobs of the people who are helping customers. And so everything you do, and again, it goes back to the inverted pyramid, everything you do is in support of your frontline associates and your customers. And

that's how you have to think about the orientation of your business. Bernie also, the quote unquote headquarters in Home Depot is not called the headquarters. It's called the store support center. That's not that unusual in retail, but it's a real, the idea is you're there to support the store. That's what you're there to do. What are some of the other ingredients? Those could be pre-existing. So before, before you arrived or, uh, changes that you and your team helped to, to make, uh, that helped foster the orange apron cult, that sort of that dedication to customer service. Uh, because it seems at least based on what I'd read that you, you really paid a lot of attention to, I'm not going to say resurrecting it, but really reinforcing

that as a core differentiator. Uh, so it goes through, I mean, it starts with, and again, this is another Bernieism, but you need to take care of your associates. And so even when things were really tough in the housing downturn, we were giving our hourly associates pay raises and bonuses when we weren't in the store support center. We pay our assistant store managers get stock grants, which I don't think any other retailer anywhere near the Home Depot size. And now those stock grants, you know, those are worth a lot of money. So getting them bought into and understanding that the success of the company is their success as well. Also on pay, we instituted a very strong success sharing program. So if your store does well, the associates get an extra bonus.

All of those things to say, look, I can't expect an associate to care about paying attention to the customer if the company isn't caring about the associate. We did lots of other programs and then a lot on the recognition and reward side to reinforce the culture of the company. But you do actually have to focus on how you pay people. There's only so much you can do without addressing. You've got to be creating opportunities for wealth generation for your team. And that's what's got to be, as I said, that's what's got to be exciting to you and what's got to be driving. One of the bullets that was suggested to me

as a point to explore with you, it's in fact the number one that was suggested by this friend of mine, is accountability. And this is what he wrote. Every time something went wrong, he took responsibility. Even right before he left Home Depot and a transition plan was set up, there was a security breach. It was 56 million credit card numbers or so.

And Frank took the blame, also fixed things fast. He has uncanny self-awareness. Quite separately, I had wanted to chat about this. So the incident response room that was set up on the 20th floor of Home Depot, not headquarters, the store support site. How did you handle that crisis? What was your thinking process? Can you just take us through that? Because I really like to kind of explore the macro by digging into the micros. Maybe we can talk about this. So Home Depot, we had a data breach in September of 2014 in the sort of ironic commentary in August. We had actually spent a half a day going through with our

board why we thought we were in pretty good shape and weren't going to have a data breach but obviously we did. We had a couple of so once we knew we went out and made a public announcement right away. And my principles were, and I don't, I think there was a very nice article written on, hey, you've accepted accountability for this. And another way to look at it is, well, I mean, really? There wasn't, I mean, you had to. I mean, that wasn't, not a serious choice. And understand, and this is where it actually helped being a lawyer, and understand that the help that the lawyers are going to give you is not help.

Because the lawyers are going to say things like, well, don't admit that you did anything wrong because then you're going to be subject to litigation and all the rest. And you've got to understand that actually all that matters is taking care of your customers. So I actually gave the pen. I said, nothing is going to be written about what we do here from our legal team. Love our legal team. We're great lawyers, but it's all going to be written by our we do here from our legal team. Love our legal team. We're great lawyers, but it's all going to be written by our person in charge of communications. And all we're going to talk about is, as a customer, you're not liable, and here's what we're doing for you. And then we just decided we were going to be completely transparent. So every time we knew

something, we said something, it was really painful because the nature of these things is that you don't really know what's going on. It unfolds over time. And so we'd have one release after another. It felt like we were constantly in the barrel. But I think people appreciated that we were being transparent and focused on taking care of our customer. And we didn't really see any significant decline. Was that a difficult or an easy conversation to have in terms of how you were choosing to respond? Do you remember sitting down and having that first conversation or any of those? I do.

We set out here are three principles. The only thing that matters is how we communicate to the customers. The second thing is I tell people just recognize. The second principle is recognize no one is going to say massive data breach at Home Depot. Everybody did things right. So understand we screwed up. Don't worry about that. Worry about fixing it.

And I was really pleased, and I give a lot of credit to our CIO at the situation, said that they saw less finger-pointing CYA activity with Home Depot than anybody else. So it was, hey, let's just move forward and get this thing fixed. And we got through it. It wasn't, I mean, there wasn't a lot of discussion about weighing other alternative approaches. I was very fortunate because my board was entirely supportive of how we handled it. I would imagine having the legal credentials that you do also helps because you can think about it from the perspective of a general counsel,

but make the executive decision to do something different. Exactly. And know that in the end, the value gained from that is modest in terms of the value potentially lost by not being straightforward with your customers. And frankly, our lawyer was 110% behind that too. You mentioned three principles. Could you review them for us? Yeah, so it was customers first,

know CYA, and fix the problem. Okay, so recognize is related to problem solving. Right. It's like, don't try to spin the facts. Right. Yep. right it's like don't try to spin the facts right yep uh what were there any decisions that that that stick out for you as far as the the most difficult or one of the more difficult decisions conversations you've had to you had to have during your tenure at home depot are there any particular

difficult periods because looking at your resume, I can imagine quite a few people thinking to themselves, my God, this guy just bats 1,000 every time he steps up to the plate and find it very intimidating, I think with some understanding. But any particular difficult times,

it doesn't have to be at Home Depot. In fact, I mean, another question I like to ask, and if this is, uh, an easier way to go about it, it could be throughout any, at any point in your career, but a favorite failure. And what I mean by that is a failure that in some way set you up for later success. Are there any examples, difficult times, difficult decisions, or failures that ended up being for the better? So it's an embarrassing failure, but I'll give a failure that was a great wake up for me. So before I became CEO, one of the things I did for Home Depot is I did our real estate and as I mentioned

my son worked at the company still works at the company but at the time had just come back from Iraq and was starting working in a store in Depot and was given I think a temporary store assistance manager or a store manager, I can't remember exactly which, out in Colorado Springs. So I fly out there to see him, and he's there with four or five of his colleagues

who had also just returned from Iraq, and they're telling the stories. And I thought I worried about it as a parent, but at the end of it, I was just kind of overwhelmed by wow i didn't worry nearly enough and these and and these people are just profoundly heroic so that was the dinner then in the morning i say great frank i'm gonna drive out and see your store in brand new store so it was a store i was responsible for brand new store and great here was a store I was responsible for, a brand new store. And great, here's the address. And so I'm driving out to the store. I drive down and I don't see it. I kind of go three miles up, don't see it. Three miles back, don't see it. Do it again,

do it again. Finally, I see it. And the store is hidden by this massive berm along the roadway. And there's this tiny little sign saying Home Depot. And then the store itself, if you know the construction of the store, the store has beams where they shouldn't be. I mean, it was just. And I go, this was my job. It was one, we were doing 200 stores a year at the time. This was my job. This was a number.

I was just getting a number out to check my box. And this is my son's damn store. That's heartbreaking. And my commentary to myself was, personalize this. Make this personal. Feel it's personal. Your son may not be doing every job, but pretend that there's somebody, you know, there are people at the end of these decisions and focus on that and don't check a number box. As I say, not a happy mistake, failure, but clearly a failure and one hopefully I'll learn from. So the word worry or worrying has come up quite a bit. And it strikes me that perhaps there

are different species of worrying in the sense that there's maybe passive worrying or something just eats at you and eats at you. And it's, as I heard someone say to me once, worrying is praying for what you don't want. And then perhaps there are other forms of worrying that are more active. So when something is bothering you or you see a potential risk, what is the thought process or the next steps for you? How do you then take it out of your head so it's not just acid in the vessel and do something with it? And any examples? Well, so there are different parts of worrying then just as you said tim there are lots of different ways of worrying on a personal level uh you know i always found i just

take the worry to okay here are a series of things that can go wrong every single thing goes wrong and i mean you could ask my kids i I joke, I always figured I'd end up driving a taxi or an Uber now. Just follow it all through and you're driving a taxi and, you know, that's not the end of the world. And just deal with it that way. The more constructive worrying is when you actually try to break it down and say, okay, what am I worried about? And typically the answer to that is take the worry from the generic and move it to some level of ground engagement. Go check it out.

Go check it out. Go figure out what's actually happening. Odds are you'll be less worried, and even if you're not less worried, odds are you'll actually have an answer to how to deal with your worries. So step number one is fact-finding. Yeah. All right. So I read a great book many years ago.

So this is another book that has traveled with me. Yeah. One of the others. So along with the story of Home Depot, there's one called How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie. Okay. Wow. That sounds like a profound book.

It's a fantastic book. Yeah. And one of the first steps is this fact-finding. Right. Like, don't assume that your worry is well-founded. Right. Don't assume you figured it out. Right.

Go do some fact-finding. After you've done that, whether you're, let's say perhaps you're less worried, perhaps you're more worried, but still worried nonetheless, this is a legitimate risk. What do you do then? So if you ask the people who work for me at Home Depot, and they sometimes joke about this,

that I just would do anxiety transfer. I just go, okay, hey, here's my observation. This isn't going well. You got it. You got it. You go, and I think. Anxiety transfer.

And I think, and that is my view of careers. Careers exist. People progress in their lives through solving bigger and bigger problems. So you go, here, here's a problem. Here's what I see. Here's a developmental opportunity for you. Here's a developmental opportunity. See if you can go fix this.

I was wondering, as you said it, what anxiety transfer would mean. A friend of mine, and he's a humorist, also a fantastic writer named A.J. Jacobs. He writes for Esquire, among many other things that he does. And at one point, he was experimenting with outsourcing to India, the Philippines, and so on. And he was trying to broaden the number of tasks that he could delegate to someone else, keeping in mind that this is all a bit tongue-in-cheek. And one of the things he did, because he is a real worrier, and he decided to outsource his worrying. So whether it was a book deadline or something else, he would ask someone in Bangalore

to worry about it for him. And he told me that it actually worked. It actually just to know that someone was worrying about it on my behalf. I love that. I love that. That's terrific. Outsource the warrior. Yes. I like that. What advice did you give to your successor at Home Depot? Did you have sort of a presidential meeting? Let me tell you a few things that I've learned in the trenches, a few things to keep in mind. Did you have that conversation? I'm sure we did, but I'm sure he also didn't need it. Let's say that it were someone coming in fresh, right? So they didn't have the experience with Home Depot. What advice might you have given them aside from what we've discussed so far? Is there anything you would add on top of that? I think it's listening and how important listening, communicating, and getting your whatever remember who said it, but what you always want to get to is simplicity that's on the other side of complexity. That's the goal for whatever it is you're working on.

And when you get there, you know you've got it and you know you really understand it. And whenever you find yourself just bound up in complexity, you just know you haven't worked it hard enough. How did you, you'd mentioned the simple and portable messaging earlier. How would you suggest someone develop that skill? Or how did you develop that skill? Think about stories, I think is the way way to start i mean uh listening to your podcast listening to how you tease out things from people it's in the end you remember stories and so if you said this is where i'm trying to go and this is the story around it uh you can get pretty simple portable messages um slogans don't do it it It's much, much better if you can say, here's the story.

Here's what it looks like. Because people respond to the stories. Do you remember any stories that you've told that have had a particularly large impact or that you've just received a lot of positive feedback about? And it harkens back to you talking about reading these passages in your very first sort of address to the troops. But are there any other moments that come to mind? Could be one-on-one, could be with a smaller group,

could be with the entire base of associates. That's Home Depot related or more broadly? Anything. All right, so anything uh so one of the fun things they're doing uh post home depot is a is a podcast listening to yours and go gosh these podcasts are fascinating so we do something called crazy good turns that talks about people who do crazy good things for others and And there are great, I love it for lots of different reasons, but here's the story.

So we've been doing it for three years, and there's one human story. All of the stories are wonderful, but there's one in particular that I particularly love. There's a woman, she happens to live in Atlanta. She's now around 70 years old. When she was three years old, and she describes very poor circumstances, and her mom leaves her in the apartment and goes across the street to get groceries. She's in the apartment with her sister. She's playing on the

sofa. She finds some matches down the cushion. She lights them. She's wearing cotton pajamas, and she goes up like a match. She's entirely on fire. Raced to the hospital, third-degree burns covering most of her body. And again, this is now 65, 67 years ago. Massive blood transfusions required skin grafts. They put out an all-point bulletin on a need for blood. A truck driver driving through the town hears this, stops, donates blood, and donates skin.

And apparently a skin graft is like one of the most painful operations ever. I can imagine. Gets into his truck and drives on. And you go, I go, if that's not the best story ever of people doing something for someone else and then, I mean, just, so that's my favorite, favorite story. You mentioned post Home Depot.

What are you focused on these days? What types of projects are keeping you, keeping your mind occupied? So this Crazy Good Turns podcast, I have a lot of fun with. I don't do most of the work on that. The co-founder with me, Brad Shaw, does the real work. And we work together at Home Depot, and it goes to the message and the story. And what Brad did at Home Depot was a lot of that storytelling of how you get these messages that are portable that people understand. Was he in comms or was he in?

Exactly. He was head of our corporate communications and did just a phenomenal job. And so we have great fun working on this podcast. And then when I started retirement, I had this elegant theory, or I thought it was elegant. I said I was going to spend a third of my time on business stuff, a third of my time on personal stuff, and then a third of my time giving back. And that actually turns out to be sort of a useless way to think about it.

Why is that? Well, it's sort of choppy and it's not continuous enough. And it struck me recently. So in November, I got to spend a day. This is an interesting story in itself, I got to spend a day traveling around with Ken Langone, who Ken is one of the co founders of Home Depot, he was my lead director at the start of Home Depot. And he's just one of life's phenomenal people. And I realized at the end of it, that really what I want to learn is I want to figure out how to be authentically generous.

And whatever it is I'm doing, I mean, some people pay me for help. Some people don't pay me for help. People who pay me for help are probably frustrated by it. But it's generosity. So putting that piece together with Welch's final advice and how do you learn to do that? And it's not something that comes naturally to me. I'm not the kind of person who, you know,

you see the beggar in the street and I reach in my pocket and give a buck. I'm much more the kind of person who's going, oh, that's not really going to help him for the following reason. But that's what I'm working on. I'm trying to figure out how to be more genuinely helpful and generous. How are you working on it? Because it seems like just like with worry, you have subsets of worry. There are many different ways to be generous,

and it might mean different things to different people. Yeah, exactly. So how are you working on it? Yeah, so, and I don't. And I'm way short, right? Way, way, way, way short. But I know if you kind of work right to left and you go, what do I want people to say? I'd love them to say that, you know, whenever.

So there are small things in terms of just giving. I mean, giving money is one way to do it. Trying to be helpful when you do it so that it's not just writing a check, and it actually takes a lot of thought. I've learned this. I get to hang around a fair amount with Ken and with Bernie, and Bernie now, what he does is his foundation. That's what Ken does.

How you think about doing that and how you actually think about being helpful to people as you're generous with your own resources, it's learning. And I can tell there are some things I do where I think I'm being helpful where people go, God, that's fascinating, but keep your help to yourself. And other things I do where I think I'm a little more successful on.

Where do you think, what falls in the latter category? Particularly people who are starting things and for whatever reason in dealing with their own anxiety, find it helpful to talk to somebody else who's got some perspective

and can help them feel like they're making progress on whatever direction they're going. And I think one of the great things that's true now that wasn't true when I was growing up is that people are actually really willing to take some risks and do things and start their own businesses and start their own charities and step out. And that's phenomenal. And helping that is great. So there are probably hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of entrepreneurs listening to this. And I'd love to go to some of my well-worn rapid-fire questions,

but I might tweak it a little bit. So I very often ask about the most gifted books or most re-read, which I'll probably ask anyway. But we're going to back into that by asking, uh, if, are there any particular books you would recommend if you could recommend say two or three books could be more to an entrepreneur, maybe they're a year into their business or in the early stages, uh, doesn't necessarily have to be early stages. I know I'm adding a lot of qualifiers here, but what books might you recommend to them? So we talked about one of

them, Built from Scratch, I think is just a great book. And any entrepreneur should read it. Saying this, not because I'm on this podcast, but because I started listening to your podcast, and I think your books are phenomenal. And I think what's great about them is that you make an effort to kind of pull out from people, here's what I think is kind of a core part of what makes whatever it is I do successful. And as a reader or as a listener, I can kind of choose. I can say, yeah, okay, that makes sense. Or no, boy, that person's just way, way, way doing something different. And I don't believe that there's any one particular, you know, as a business person, I love Jim Collins' Good to Great.

But you can also look at that and go, oh, this is fascinating because the companies that were originally Good to Great are now not so great, not even existing. So you have to be willing to understand that there are lots of different stories, and then you find your own within that. So I give your book because I think it's very cool. I think it's much more people have to have more respect for differences and different ways of approaching problems. There's no one path. No one path.

Are there any books besides Built From Scratch that you've gifted a lot to other people or re-read a lot yourself? So the book I tend to gift people has nothing to do with business. It's a book by a writer called Clive James, and it's called Cultural Amnesia. And first off, he writes, he is so learned that you just want to read what he has to say. So he's,

and I assume he's not making this up, but, you know well, I wanted to read Proust, but I didn't know French, so I started with La Rousse and start learning French. And you go, okay, anybody who can do that, I'm interested in what he has to say. But the book is interesting because it talks about, to me it's interesting because it talks about how World War II and the guilt around World War II, particularly in Europe, infected all of the sort of liberal arts world. And the unwillingness to actually face into the fact that there was more collaboration than people wanted to admit. And so oftentimes the people that were truly heroic are actually heavily criticized because the people who were less than heroic couldn't stand the comparisons. And you go through all of these different literary figures

and you go, whoa, didn't know that backstory. That's pretty interesting. So is cultural amnesia, is it a collection of examples and narratives related to, I'm just trying to make sure I'm clear. He goes through different authors. And these are people who are chopped down by their contemporaries because of their success. Yeah.

Huh. Yeah. Or venerated now, but no one really sees through to, hey, maybe there are more feet of clay than I want to say. It makes me think of, that sounds fantastic. I want to check that out. Now, do you give that to people? Well, let me spit out what was on top of my brain,

which was, it reminds me of a quote from Francis Ford Coppola when he was being interviewed by a friend of mine, Robert Rodriguez, who's here in Austin, filmmaker. And I think it was during this interview that he said, I'm paraphrasing, but of course, Francis Ford Coppola, one of the greats. And he said, the same things that get you fired when you're younger are the things that give you lifetime achievement awards for when you're older, which I thought was a keen observation. Do you give this to people to

embolden them, to give them courage to do things with the expectation of facing that type of blowback? Why do you give this book? I give it first because when he talks, so the cultural amnesia is the subtext of what he's talking about. But he also just is such a great observer of different writers and it makes you want to read all of the source material that he's writing about. So if you like reading books, and I like reading books, it's one of those books that first, as I say, you go, this may be the smartest human being who's ever put pen to paper and is just brilliantly smart. And secondly, that's an interesting way to look at history and how history has impacted things.

But it's more just, do you love books and do you love these authors? Are there any books that you've finished recently or that you're reading currently? So the book that I just finished recently, it's not a full-fledged book, so it's real short, 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso. And it's kind of a neat book because her objective is, I'm going to reduce this book to the 300 things that you'd underline if I wrote a real book. And so it's got a lot of little, it's a, I mean,

you could read it in less than an hour. But it's got a really, it's kind of like Montaigne. It's like little statements. Lots of aphorisms. Little aphorisms. What's the theme of the book? Great question. And if I were a deeper reader, I'd probably be able to tell you the theme.

And I'm probably doing her book massive injustice by not knowing what the theme is. To me, it was sort of a random set of… It's an eclectic mix. I mean, it just bounces around with different observations, some of which you go, God, that's brilliant. And some of them, yeah. How did you choose that book? And I guess the broader question is, how do you choose books? Because we all have finite time on this planet.

Yeah. How do you go about choosing books? So on that one, and I can't remember what the path was that got me. There's a guy who writes a blog, Austin Kleon. Yeah, Austin Kleon. All right. Also an Austinite. He's also here.

Oh, no kidding. All right. So I don't know quite why I got to his book. Steal Like an Artist, I think, is one of his books. He has a number. So I start reading his blog, and he talks about, and he had something that said, here are the 15 best books I read in 2017. And I go, done.

I'm going to read the 15. And that was one of the books. He had some others and I'm going through them. I'm going to make those all 15. Well, Austin. Yeah. Good work, sir. Yeah.

This next question is very much a left turn, and it's a hit or miss question. So if it's a flub on my side, we can skip it. But what is the purchase of $100 or less, could be $1,000 or less, whatever, that comes to mind that has positively impacted your life in the last year or two? Does anything come to mind that has positively impacted your life in the last year or two? Does anything come to mind?

So if I can bump it up above $200, it's shoes. All right. So recognize that I spent years walking concrete floors. Yeah. And as I was saying on my back thing, shoes are just hugely important. So I got a shoe that I actually really like. What is the shoe? Sam Hubbard shoes.

Sam Hubbard. Yeah. So all for the last however many years, I don't have the patience to actually go through the right sizing, and so I never wear the right size shoes. It's just been an enormous frustration. And I finally found a pair of shoes I really like. Sam Hubbard. Yeah. Big fan of shoes.

Yeah. really like sam hubbard yeah so i'm a big fan of shoes yeah i i became fixated on shoes at one point because uh as backstory i'd been extremely stingy yeah stingy sounds too scrooge mcduck cheap right economical right uh for my entire life really i mean i was the guy who would have his girlfriend complain about the single-plight toilet and be like, really, Tim? Can we just get two-ply? This is terrible. And I would always buy the cheapest shoes that seemed comfortable and were tolerable to my girlfriend, aesthetically. And at one point, I was in Panama talking to this wonderful woman who was the wife of this gent who at one point had owned the largest brewery in Panama, maybe Central America. And a really wise woman. And she said to me, you know, Tim, because she was looking at my shoes and I just had nothing appropriate for Panama.

She said, there are two places you should really spend money. She said, if necessary, your mattress and your shoes, because if you're not in one you're going to be in the other and i was like that's great advice so that is phenomenal advice yeah so the sam humber i mean i i really pay attention to the shoes now because uh well i should say what contributed to that or reinforced it was my experience in writing about cooking and you have line cooks who are standing all day prep i mean they're standing all day and they a lot of them wear shoes designed for hospital use for they're these slip-on shoes that are used by nurses and doctors fantastic all right well i have

i have a shoe type to check out uh If you were to teach a class to, let's call it, high school seniors or college students, you could pick the grade. And actually, you could pick any grade. What class would you teach and why? History.

History. Just because history is about people uh history we learn so much from history i'd love teaching history i wasn't a great history student but after you know when you think about what books are fun to read it's great to read history books and so any particular focus what would the course description look like uh i i i like american history i'm not that familiar with you know i haven't spent enough time to know the history of other countries but i think our history is is unbelievably complex and fascinating i've been going through the Oxford history of the United States, sort of book by book, and they get maybe more deeply in than I might want to,

but it's fascinating. It's great. Is there any particular historical figure from U.S. history? And that was a little Department of Redundancy department, but that's okay. Is there any historical figure in the U.S. you would particularly have liked to meet or have dinner with? Does anyone come to mind? Boy, there's so many, right?

You could list more than one. You could have a lot of fascinating people. I'd actually, Truman would be interesting and Eisenhower would be interesting. I think both of those characters, for the decisions they faced, and eisenhower uh you know i think we so he was the president that i grew up with and so much deeper than any picture that we have of him that would be interesting eisenhower gets used a lot as an example by peter drucker as an effective as an effective executive. I believe it. The military has so many great learnings on leadership. A lot to be borrowed. A lot.

A lot to be borrowed there, for sure. All right, last few questions. If you could put anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, so a word, a sentence, a quote could be yours or someone else's to get out to millions or billions of people what might you put on that uh it would be uh the only blessings you own are the ones you share and um that's you know that's the most fun thing about this Crazy Good Turns thing is seeing the people who live that every day, who are seeing things, seeing plights, people in need that others...

I mean, there's a great one. I could go on and on about this, but there's a great story of who knew that there were homeless people living in tunnels under Las Vegas? And then here's a guy who recognizes this and goes and takes care of the homeless people in tunnels in Las Vegas. And you go, wow, that's amazing. Get more of that, please. So Crazy Good Turns. Yeah. If you wanted to get someone hooked on Crazy Good Turns, are there one or two episodes that you might suggest they start with?

I would start at the start. Team Rubicon, we did an early one on Team Rubicon, which is the group of Iraqi and Afghan war veterans who come back and people are probably familiar with them. They use

their military training to go if there's a flood they go and address the flood and amazing it's an amazing uh group uh early on i mean they're all i love you know it's like kids which which are your favorite kids i just so that's the first one but every single one of them and then i think the second one we did was uh um about tunnel to tower tunnels to tower you know the story of the the guy who was the fireman on his day off and uh the twin towers are hit and he's driving in to help his uh fire you know his colleagues and the tunnel is by backed up and so he puts all his gear and runs through the tunnel to the towers and unfortunately died and you know then there's now a

um uh a run every year through the tower in commemoration of that but you know just people are so i i'd start with the start and the first ones but i love them all they're as i say it's like choosing among kids why did you create it or why did you co-create it what's why put this into the world i mean i know it takes effort it uh it's the so if if um when we started it was and my first comment to brad shaw the guy who does it with me was is that i if eight people listen to this i'll be thrilled because i just want to take someone who's done amazing things and talk about them and just have them have a notion that someone's going to spend you know ours are short you ours are short 25 minutes talking about the great thing they do.

And then Brad did such a good job of it that now we're saying, okay, we want people to listen to it. But it goes back to the concept of celebrating. Whatever it is you want, celebrate. Highlight it. And highlight it and tell stories about it. And we connect from hearing these stories. And sometimes you go, wow, this person is just so much better person than I'm ever going

to be that forget it. That's out of the ballpark. But it's still inspirational. And then some of them you go, oh, yeah, OK, I can do that. Maybe I'll correct course one day. Yeah. So for all of you who complain that my interviews are too long, I mean, certainly many of you listened to the entire interview, but if you'd like a short form fix, you just check out

Crazy Good Turns. And I'm going to make, I don't do this very much, but I'm going to make an ask of the audience. And then I'm going to ask you if you have any parting words, suggestions, advice, or asks of the audience. So beyond checking out crazy good turns, I would challenge everyone listening for a day, maybe a week, to not criticize. So to try to put into practice what we've been talking about, and that is highlighting and applauding

what it is you want to see more of in the world. If you see someone online who's doing something great, who's making sacrifices for the greater good, practice applauding that. Because if you do criticize, and the criticism online is certainly 99% of what we see, but practice makes perfect even if the practice isn't a good practice. So if you focus on being critical, you'll get better at it, and it'll become easier. So for a day, for a week,

try to focus on applauding what it is you want to see more of out in the world. So that would be my challenge, my suggestion to everybody who is listening to this, and I will do the same for myself. I will eat my own dog food on that one.

So any parting words? Well, that's great. I'm not going to begin to improve on that. That is brilliant and it is so true. It's so true. If you take time to recognize and appreciate other people, it bounces back, It gives back. Very cool.

Perfect. Well, sorry to go first. No. But I wanted to get that out because I feel so strongly about it. There's so much negativity out in the world. You and I, none of us have to create more of it. There's a surplus of negativity. So try to focus on increasing the positivity.

And you don't get the positive just by shutting down the negative. That void doesn't fill itself. Where can people learn more about you, find you online, if there is any way that you would like to share? And of course, everyone who is listening to this, you can find the show notes with links to everything, including crazy good turns and so on at Tim.blog forward slash podcast.

But are there any other places people can say hello or learn more about what you're up to? At Frank Blake on Twitter. That's probably the dominant in addition to the crazy good turns. Fantastic. Well, Frank, thank you so much for your time. What a treat.

Thank you. This was a lot of fun. And for everyone out there on the interwebs, wherever you may be, as always, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off.

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