Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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?

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!

There are lots of books on change but this one gives practical information that you can use tomorrow without losing theoretical sophistication. It is the only model that I know of that deals well with all three arenas: head, heart and hands. I particularly liked ithe "what to do to fail" lists. The book is realistic in that it does not present the consultants and the company as all-knowing. The examples of mistakes and corrections give a realistic picture of the what a real change project feels like. If a company is going through (or planning) a change process, this would be a great book to read and discuss as a group.

Three interesting observations...
1) I'm surprised Best Buy management would allow these details to become public
2) I liked the way the consultants admitted they learned something, too
3) There are many paragraphs where one could change the name of the company from "Best Buy" to your company's name, and the text would apply to YOU.

...Elizabeth & Andy understate the influence they & their change management leadership wrought on Best Buy. It was their process, as brilliantly outlined in their book, that took entrepreneurial potential and realized its promise into profit by organizing a company culture around the change management principles laid out in this book. Without "Head, Heart & Hands," Best Buy may have been just another company that squandered that potential.

What this book is not, is a history of Best Buy from it's founding through it's world class success...two years ago topping the S&P list of best ROI comapnies over a five year period.

What this book is, is an easy read of simple but involved change management principles on transforming a company from potential to world class success...that two years ago topped the S&P list of best ROI companies over a five year period.

When I came across this book I could not put it down. It was as if I were reliving Elizabeth and Andy's presentations. The book does not communicate as well as Elizabeth & Andy do in person, on a podium, but it's language and it's points are eminently digestible, if not delectable.

If you are interested in a well written read about a company's transformation into a leader in its industry....this book is for you. If you are interested in a company's cultural revolution that unlocks a company's potential into streams of profit...this book is for you.

Elizabeth & Andy congratulations on what you did at Best Buy, and congratulations on being able to translate this process into an easily understandable book for all cultural revolutionists and change agents.

Big Change at Best Buy looks at the implementation of the Standard Operating Platform (SOP) that changed the way Best Buy stores were managed, operated, and supplied. It looks at Best Buys implementation of this program as they experienced hyper growth opening more than 40 stores per year for several years. Ensuring a consistent product and retail experienced when dealing with a store that includes this many departments is nothing short of a nightmare and this book explains how it is done well. It includes what Best Buy did, why it worked and what others can do for a similar experience. Focusing on humans (employees) through head, hearts and hands it takes a step by step approach to how managers can implement change and preserve employee morale and knowledge base.

If there is one problem with the book (and the reason I give it four instead of five stars) it is that the SOP is never really described in detail so you do not get a look at what is changing at Best Buy. You understand that a major shift in operational, procedural, supply chain, and employee mindset is occurring but you do not get the full picture as to what that change is.

Overall if you are looking to introduce a major change to a company (big or small) this is a great way to look at how to implement. Recommended for MBA students as well looking into management of people as a possible best practices approach.

I wanted to read this book because the current economic crisis took Circuit City out of business. Best Buy, however, keeps its doors open, so I needed to learn about the company because I might want to buy their stock. In this book, the authors provide a historical overview of how the company was founded in 1966 and went public in 1985 with only eleven stores. Its business model was lots of inventory, low prices, and lots of advertising. It grew so fast that the management could not handle this hyper-growth well and profitability suffered. The company had to change its ways because it was entering another stage.

The book talks not only about how Best Buy made this change, but also about how its industry is the most competitive in retailing with very low margins. While I admired the management's abilities, I don't think I will ever want to invest my money in any company in that industry. It is too cutthroat and the Internet is making it more difficult.

- Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market

This book provides both a useful model and an interesting case study for change. The model is deceptively simple but builds on a great deal of psychological research. Its focus on cognitive, emotional and behavioral aspects of change makes it broader and more sophisticated than most other models and it provides many practical tools for managing and leading change.

if you like fiction... you will LOVE this book. it is the farthest thing from truth and reality you can ever dream of. Best (Worst) Buy is going in the hole because of their poor customer service. this book fails to mention that there is a website (not blog... actual full-blown website) called bestbuysux.org that chronicles how horrible of a company they are by both customers AND employees! don't waste your money on this book of printed lies!