Big Change at Best Buy: Working Through Hypergrowth to Sustained Excellence [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Gibson (Author), Andy Billings (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0891061762 | ISBN-13: 978-0891061762 | Publication Date: February 27, 2003 | Edition: 1

This book captures the essence of how company-wide and culture-deep transformational change helped propel the company to become the country's most talked about learning organization, with record-breaking profits and skyrocketing stock prices.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A book you'll probably find helpful. Tells in vivid detail how the retailer turned itself around despite initial resistance. -- Fortune, June 9, 2003

Best Buy has enjoyed an uninterrupted series of enormous successes; that fact makes the book so valuable for organizations. -- Business Book Review, February 2004

Brings successful management techniques of a Minnesota corporation to a national audience. -- Women's Business Minnesota, July 2003

Insightful story of a change initiative. Compelling account. Details and clear breakdown of methods make book a fascinating case study. -- Soundview Executive Book Summaries, September 2003

Offers some insights into challenges of modern retailing. The adoption of the scorecards to measure progress is very informative. -- Quality Management Journal, July-August 2004

Presents compelling picture in absorbing manner. Authors' views on what is required to sustain change are recommended for every CEO. -- Training Magazine, January 2004

Very in-depth, loaded with charts and graphs. Extremely straightforward in its approach. A real handbook of a successful change initiative. -- 800-CEO-READ, Jack Covert Selects, April 2003

From the Publisher

Destined to redefine successful change management in corporate America, BIG CHANGE AT BEST BUY offers hard-won lessons and the tools every executive and manager needs--in every business and every industry--to turn management practices and a culture focused on rapid growth into the type of disciplined, customer-centered operation that now drives Best Buy's success. The first and only book to tell the stunning turnaround story of Best Buy Co., Inc., it gives a play-by-play account of the change initiative itself, with a close-up view of the methods and tools developed to orchestrate the most culturally intense transformation in the history of U.S. business.

Endorsed by Ken Weller, Chairman & CEO, The Good Guys; Robert L. Joss, Dean, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University; Thomas C. Healy, President, Best Buy International; Hubert Saint-Onge, CEO, Konverge and Know; Marshall Goldsmith, Forbes Top 5 executive coaches and Wall Street Journal Top 10 executive educators; Patricia Woolcock, Executive Director, The California Strategic Human Resource Partnership; and James Bandrowski, author of Corporate Imagination.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing; 1 edition (February 27, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0891061762
• ISBN-13: 978-0891061762
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #255,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Big Change at Best Buy is a Must Buy, April 21, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Big Change at Best Buy: Working Through Hypergrowth to Sustained Excellence (Hardcover)

Therer are lots of books on transformational change out there. Few if any compare to Big Change at Best Buy for its candor, its practicality or its thoroughness. The authors take the reader on a no holds barred 5 year journey. The guts of the company are laid bare for better or for worse as senior executives share their struggles, their doubts, their hard won successes on the road to true breakthroughs in perfomance.

This is fundamentally a book about how to improve your financial results by changing your formulas for success. The authors prescribe a "head, heart and hands" change methodology which not only makes sense intuitively, but seems to work when applied with care by a team of consultants and insiders working closely side by side.

This is no oversimplified cookbook. The ins and outs of change are detailed in a very practical straightforward manner, leaving few stones unturned. Metaphors and analogies are used liberally to help readers get a 3D color picture and to enable them to generalize the issues faced at Best Buy to their own organizations.

Tips on how to fail at each stage of the process are very instructive in what not to do....as are the many colorful quotes from menmbers of the internal change implementation team.

This book feels real...lots of conflicts, values needing to be clarified, lessons learned about change. No sugar coating, but a happy ending nonetheless.

True change seems like it never comes without a struggle. Big Change at Best Buy chronicles both the struggles and the victories won, leaving little for the reader to imagine or reconstruct. It's all there, all the tools and the instructions for how to use 'em to fundamentally transform people, systems and culture for superior financial results.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Phil Ruffner, Sundyne, July 17, 2003

By 

Phil (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Big Change at Best Buy: Working Through Hypergrowth to Sustained Excellence (Hardcover)

I found the book to be interesting and challenging enough to order a copy for each member of my management team. My take on this book is that it provides a great deal of insight into managing the evolution process. As with most management texts, the most interesting and exciting parts of that insight show up in the latter third of the book. I suppose you could skip the first 175 pages and still get the flavor of what RHR and Best Buy did, but I encourage you to read it all. The last 100 pages will be your reward for getting through the first 175.

Things I noted in particular:

1) Early in the book, the authors set up the concept of the Head, Heart and Hands. The Head talks about getting the concept. The Heart talks about motivation, the desire to apply what was learned. The Hands is about putting the concepts into action and producing results.

2) There is a lot of discussion about the role of the Senior Managers in this process, I suggest you test yourself against the model that develops and see if you meet the authors' expectations.

3) If you don't read any other part of the book, I ask you to read pages 216 and study the table on page 234.

4) On page 216 you will see "When people set out to measure the effects of change on business results such as productivity, sales, profit, and employee turnover, they are measuring the outcomes of a process. Measuring results does not provide much information on how the change is proceeding or what issues might be impeding or furthering the change process." We all certainly focus on a couple of the measures cited - to what extent do we sacrifice the longer view in doing so?

The authors got me with the following: "Knowing the score at the end of a game gives you limited information about how the individuals played, where they need to improve, or what's getting in the way of their achieving a better score."

Sound familiar?

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's not just for CEO's, April 21, 2003

By 

Bob Carson (Blaine, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Big Change at Best Buy: Working Through Hypergrowth to Sustained Excellence (Hardcover)

I have been teaching in the public schools for 30 years. One of the things that I have done since Tom Peter's came out with his "In Search of Excellence" is keep a close eye on what is being done in the economic sector and applying those principles in my classroom. "Big Change . . ." caught my attention immediately after I read the first chapter. It was not only an interesting read, but I knew it was going to make me change my way of doing business in the classroom.

As a teacher who has always held the ancient Greeks in esteem, I have always thought the best products were ones that employed the head, heart, and hands, but I had never thought of it in quite the same way as presented in "Big Change". While I have always "soap boxed" the idea, I have never tried to make it a mindset, to actually change the culture. Next year I will try to do just that in my classroom using the tools that are presented in this excellent book. Because the process is so well laid out, I expect to succeed in changing the culture of education in my classroom.

I also teach a class at Western Washington University on how to create change. This book will be required reading because when you are finished with this book, you have the tools to implement change that lasts and makes a difference. "Big Change" is a best buy!