The Future Leader

8Morality, Ethics, and Transparency

On January 2, 2012, Forbes published a story with the title “Why Best Buy Is Going out of Business…Gradually” (Downes, 2012). Online this article has almost 4 million views. But Forbes clearly underestimated Best Buy's new CEO.

Hubert Joly is the executive chairman and former CEO (he retired in 2019) of Best Buy, a consumer electronics retailer with over 125,000 employees around the world. He joined the company in 2012 when it was struggling and many thought that Best Buy would just be another one of those retailers that would disappear. Several years later not only has Best Buy survived but it's actually thriving with higher revenues, an increased stock price (over 271% during the past five years at the time of writing this), and an aggressive growth plan for the future. Other retailers like Radio Shack and Circuit City failed where Best Buy was able to succeed. Among the several things that Hubert and his team did was invest back into the employees with new training and development programs and increased wages. Hubert helped make other people more successful so that they in turn could help the company be more successful. Not only that, but he did this while the company was struggling, something that took tremendous courage. Where other leaders would cut wages and training programs during tough times, Hubert increased them.

When I spoke with ...