CONFERENCE REPORT
THE HEART OF A LEADER
Ace Hardware CEO and president John Venhuizen wowed delegates with his keynote speech at this year’s Global DIY Summit in Dublin, outlining his definition of effective leadership and urging the leaders in the room to ask some very important questions of themselves
You may find this to be unfair, you may find this on be based on misunderstandings and,
in many
of the cases, you’re right – there is misunderstanding.
In fact, we did a study with
Burger King a few years ago of the associates who work in the store. These are people on the payroll. And, we asked them one question – for every one dollar of revenue that the customer gives us that goes through the cash register, how many pennies do you think the owner puts in his pocket? Do you know what the average answer was? 67 cents! Business has a bad brand – that is a leadership challenge and it’s on us.”
The second observation and one that John believes should bother the industry even more is that “most of your workforce are aimless, purposeless, bored, and entirely disengaged”. “These are people on our
payroll!” he exclaimed. “72% of the US workforce is disengaged. 20% are so disengaged that, prior to 9/11 we used to call them customer terrorists because they are actually fighting against the very company that employs them.” He continued: “You can’ sit
J
ohn Venhuizen opened his presentation by clearly
setting it
apart from what so many other guest
speakers would be discussing. He said: “I have no intention of talking to you about artificial intelligence, machine learning, the cloud, omni- channel retailing or any host of buzz words that consultants use on a regular basis to work you into a frenzy of agitated chaos.” This was met with applause from the audience.
He continued: “Of the five Ps
of retailing, I’m not going to talk very much at all about four of
18 DIY WEEK 09 AUGUST 2019
them – price, product, promotion or place – what I hope to talk to you about with a renewed passion is what I believe to be by far the most important ‘p’ and that is your people.”
Having looked at the attendees list in advance, John said he realised there were very senior leaders with strong expertise in their field sitting in that room. However, he quickly added, “my contention with you is that you are not working on anything more important than the leadership of your people because everything you’re working on rises and falls on your leadership”. Addressing any sceptics in the crowd early on, who John asked
two simple questions – “why does
leadership matter? Why
ignore talking about all those other important things just to talk about people?” In order to answer that, he served up what he described as “two painful observations”. The first of these is that “business has a bad brand”.
He explained: “We all love to come together to celebrate our business success but the truth of the matter is that business has a bad brand. Most of the world thinks business is run by the rich, for the rich and usually at the expense of the most vulnerable in society; which they think is them.
around and tell me leadership doesn’t matter. We’ve got to get better at this!”
What is leadership? In order to reach a solution to these issues, John outlined his definition of what leadership means to him. He said: “I read a lot of books about leadership and there is so much written on the subject. Everybody out there trying to sell a book on leadership tries to connect leadership to everything but,
when leadership becomes
about everything, my opinion is it becomes about nothing. So I want to try and crisply define what leadership really is.”
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