Describe the culture prior to Robert Medellin's arrival

The Home Depot is an American corporation that was established in the year 1978 in the city of Atlanta USA. The retail corporation provides home improvement products/services. Over the past several years, the corporation experiences immense growth, and up to 2000, the company had more than 1100 big box stores. The organization achieve success due to its distinctive features such as warehouse feel of stores, low lighting and spare signage. Prior to Nardelli, the culture of the corporation based primarily on the rules set by Arthur Blank & Bernie Marcus, who were the founder of the corporation. Marcus & blank play an important role in the success of the business. The founders of the organization created a culture of entrepreneurship in the organization were the organization is willing to take high risks.

The founders of the company set a culture where the employee’s key focus were the customers, company, college and the community. The business model of Home depot depends highly on the store's managers who have given autonomy. The store's managers usually spend most of the time on the sales floor for meeting the needs of the customers and do not pay attention to the paperwork of the company. Furthermore, the organization lacks career development programs due to which the organization was not getting any talented store managers (Imran, Rehman, Aslam, & Bilal, 2016).

1.      How did the store managers express their dismay to the new corporate leaders prior to the culture change?

When Nardelli arrives in the organization, it was a major surprise for many of the organization's employees. No one in the organization was expecting that Blank and Marcus, who were the founders of the organization will leave the organization so soon. Most of the employees were not feeling good when the founders have left the corporation. In the beginning, the Nardelli face issues because the response of the employees was not very welcoming. Nardelli felt like an outsider in the organization. However, the board of Home Depot taken decision to bring such a manager who has the expertise to run a huge organization.

Implementing change in the organization is not an easy task because the first major issue that arises in the change implementation process is resistant to change by the employees. Many employees in the Home Depot were not ready for such a change; however, the board took the decision to start resolving the problems which can cause a decline of the business in the upcoming years. For such a huge business, talented managers were needed who can manage the business efficiently (Spender, 2014).

2.      What was Nardelli's 3-part strategy?

Robert Nardelli took its position in the organization in December 2000. Nardelli goals were to take advantage of the economies of scale, enhancing the independence of stores, inflexibility of the organization and decentralization of the corporation.  For improving the current operation of the Home Depot Nardelli formed Three-Part strategy. The Three-Part strategy includes the following main things:

·         Extending the business: Nardelli creates the strategy to expand the business by providing additional services such as home installation and renting of tools.

·         Expanding the market: Nardelli create the plan to expand the business in different geographical regions so that the needs of a huge amount of customers can be efficiently fulfilled

·         Enhancing the core: The strategy is built to increase the profitability of the organization in the current market.

For achieving the strategies, Nardelli decided to take benefit from the growing scale of the business. He decided to centralize some of the functions, such as purchasing so that buying power can be leveraged. The store operations and regions will be collaborated for improving the performance. The environment of the stores will be changed for enhanced efficiency. Tools such as Disciplined Talent Reviews, Store Manager Learning forums and Mapping of the HR Process are utilized for implementing the change (Cameron & Green, 2015).

References of Home Depot’s Blueprint for Culture Change

Cameron, E., & Green, M. (2015). Making Sense of Change Management: A Complete Guide to the Models, Tools and Techniques of

Organizational Change. Kogan Page Publishers.

Imran, M. K., Rehman, C. A., Aslam, U., & Bilal, A. R. (2016). What’s organization knowledge management strategy for successful change

implementation? 29, 1097-1117.

Spender, J.-C. (2014). Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise. OUP Oxford.