Best Buy’s Hubert Joly on Walking the Talk of Stakeholder Capitalism

Best Buy’s Hubert Joly on Walking the Talk of Stakeholder Capitalism

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

Several years ago, a distraught mom and boy came into ac big box store with a serious problem. The robot dinosaur they’d purchased, his favorite toy, wasn’t working. The store associates knew just what to do. They explained that they were actually surgeons who could fix the dinosaur’s injury. They pulled the toy behind the counter, performed their operation, really swapping one dinosaur for another, and handed the new one over to the boy who was, of course, thrilled. The associates improvised.

This was not the store’s standard operating procedure, if you’ll pardon the pun. But our guest today says that what those employees did also wasn’t an accident. Their actions stem from a culture that he and the rest of his leadership team tried to create and spread through the one struggling retailer, Best Buy. It not only made the boys’ day; it turned the company around.