Big Change At Best Buy

In 1966, Minneapolis-based Best Buy Co., Inc. began as a single small store, selling audio and stereo components. Today it is considered North America's number one consumer electronics retailer, offering the widest assortment of electronic, technology, and entertainment products at 600 retail locations. Just seven years ago, however, this pioneer of the superstore concept, showing profits of only $1 million, from $5 billion in sales, and experiencing plummeting stock prices, was on the brink of bankruptcy. But, by December 2003, Best Buy was the only consumer electronics chain to show an increase in same-store sales (9.3 percent), while Circuit City (Best Buy's nearest competitor and number one in the consumer electronics industry until the mid 1990s) was, at -2.0 percent, well below Wall Street and corporate expectations. Having come through some tough times, the company has enjoyed an uninterrupted series of enormous successes in the past several years. And, it is that fact that makes this work so valuable for organizations that want to renew themselves and to sustain that renewal.Big Change at Best Buy is the first book to document how the stunning turnaround occurred. The authors (who, as RHR International consultants, helped Best Buy achieve record-breaking profit growth and skyrocketing stock prices in just three years) offer a book within a book. Simultaneously, they provide a blow-by-blow account of how a small team put into effect a companywide cultural transformation, and they give a detailed description of a practical, proven set of tools for implementing this kind of change. These tools include working change in the three arenas of the head, heart, and hands, and their own Change ScorecardSM, considered to be a unique and powerful new method for developing behavioral maps that help to provide a clear definition of "good."Of course, the theories and processes of organizational change do not, by any means, constitute a fresh story. Nonetheless, Best Buy's story, as explored here, is less about the concepts of change and more about how these concepts were organized and communicated successfully in an enterprise that needed to move (and quickly) from an entrepreneurial organization characterized by chaos to a more mature organization characterized by systematic and disciplined ways of operating."