Please join me in welcoming Ted Decker to the stage for a conversation on leadership and values. Ted, thanks so much for being here today.
Well, thanks for having me. Anything for you, Chris. And I have to say, everyone I've met today from the Scout organization is singing your praises. I know you've been on the Scout board for seven years now, taking on increasing responsibility, and everyone just couldn't be happier for what you're doing for Scouts, as we are at Home Depot. Chris, thank you.
Thank you, Ted. It means a lot. Thank you, sir.
All right, so let's do a little warm-up question here. So Ted, tell us something about yourself that people probably wouldn't guess that the CEO of Home Depot does.
Well, you know, probably pretty boring, but I'm a big griller. Grilling is probably... I have less and less time to do things outside of work, but I do like to grill and have a number of grills and types of grills.
How many grills do you have?
I've had up to 12 grills, and my wife says we don't have any more room for any more grills, so we're out of space.
So Ted was our chief merchant for a long time and he still is the chief merchant, but every time a new grill would come out, he'd be like 'Oh my gosh, look at this grill!' He would just go crazy about it. He has a lot of grills. So that's really awesome.
All right, here's a good question for you. The Scout Oath begins with a pledge to serve. How does the Home Depot give back to communities across the country and why is this important for you and our company?
Well, giving back has always been part of Home Depot. Home Depot has two sort of artifacts of our brand. Certainly the primary is the Home Depot orange brand, but what you'll also see on our aprons are the values wheel and the inverted pyramid. I'll talk about each of those this afternoon. The values wheel is similar to the 12 attributes I think I saw on your pledge, your oath, of the attributes that a Scout is going to live. Our values wheel has eight, and they're things like taking care of our people, entrepreneurial spirit, creating shareholder value, and giving back is one of the eight. The founders were very purposeful that as we built this company, we were going to build a value system and a culture, and a huge piece of that would be giving back. So from the earliest days, we have an internal foundation that we call the Homer Fund that supports our associates. The vast majority of our associates will contribute automatically from their biweekly paycheck, and that goes into the Homer Fund, and that supports associates in need. So if you have a sickness in the family, if you're hit by a storm, a fire, something in your house, they can apply for a grant from the Homer Fund. This has been scaled to a huge level. You know this, Chris, I mean this is something like 250,000 associates have received grants to the tune of $200 plus million dollars. And then for the outreach, we have our Home Depot Foundation for the external environment. Chris, you've just joined our board on the Home Depot Foundation as well. And that has had three principal causes: one is veterans causes, homelessness for veterans. Another is trades training, the next generation of skilled tradespeople in the United States. And the third is disaster recovery. We marshal most of our external giving to those three causes, veterans being number one. We were with our top donors Wednesday night at the zoo in Atlanta, wonderful new function room. And what we did at that event is we played a video of Bernie Marcus. As you all know, Bernie passed away just a month ago. Bernie really was the architect of this value system with Arthur Blank and Ken Langone. When the company didn't have money really to do everything we needed to do internally, they immediately started to give. I think in Atlanta, their first meaningful work was with the Shepherd Center, and it went on from there. You can't drive around Atlanta without seeing the new Arthur Blank Hospital, the Marcus Wing at Grady, the new Piedmont Hospital, the aquarium. I mean, it just goes on and on what they've done as founders. What Ken Langone has done with NYU Medical up in New York, been renamed NYU Langone. So you had founders who were visible, who were giving, who set up programs like the Homer Fund internally where you could give. It's core. It's on each of our aprons. The values wheel, giving back, it's fundamentally part of the business. We don't exist for ourselves; we exist for the community and each other, and we have to give back.
That's great, Ted. And I'm a Home Depot associate for 34 years now, started as an hourly employee when I was going to college here in Atlanta. I was telling Ted earlier today, it was natural for me to fall into the fold at Home Depot and become part of the family because the values that I had grown up in my family, in church, and then in scouting, Home Depot was almost exactly the same. So it felt really natural for me to be a part of the family. It just feels good. It does. So on that note, the Scout Oath encourages us to always do our best. How do you inspire Home Depot associates to give their best in service to both their customers and communities?
Well, I'll talk a little bit about our other artifact, which is the inverted pyramid that we all wear on our aprons. This is really the symbol that we use to promote, encourage, and rally all of us to do our best. And that's to take care of the customer. The inverted pyramid is just that: when you think of a pyramid of a leadership structure, you think of a pyramid. Whether it's the military or any large organization, you have frontline troops or associates at the bottom, and the pyramid shrinks as you go up through middle management, senior management, executive management. What the founders did is they literally inverted that pyramid. So the pyramid stands on the point, which is the senior leadership, and it's very clear that the top of the pyramid, the broadest what was the base of a normal pyramid, is the top of our pyramid, and that's the customer. Underneath the customer is the frontline associate. And then in the SSC, which is what we call our store support center, not a headquarters, not a head office, it's the store support center. We all exist to support the associates so that they can support the customers. If you have a leadership model in a values-based system, as we talked about the values wheel, 100% focus on encouraging people every day to be selfless and do their best to either take care of the customer or take care of the people closest to the customer so that they can take care of the customer. That's the environment that we work in every day. And to not be satisfied and be better and better every day to make customer number one. That's something we've seen from day one that I've been there, that hasn't wavered.
