It was 1981 and Jack Welch helmed GE. Over the next two decades Welch would turn GE into a $400B behemoth. The age of American corporate management ruled. Welch’s style was brutally efficient and highly disciplined. Business units achieved number one or two in their markets or were axed. Each year all management were graded and the bottom 10 percent, regardless of context, were axed: the famous ol’ rank and yank. In his first years as CEO around 100,000 people were axed. That surgical edge created GE’s prized talent pipeline that cultivated America’s best operational executives. What mattered, above all, was “shareholder value.”

Bob Nardelli was bred in that crucible. Nicknamed ‘Little Jack’ for his emulation and adulation of his mentor, Nardelli served 30 years in GE, rising to CEO of GE Power where he quadrupled profits to $20B. He was on track to succeed Welch.

Across the country, in Atlanta 1979, two executives recently fired from a Los Angeles hardware chain decided to chase a dream and opened their first warehouse-style hardware and supplies store, Home Depot. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank grew Home Depot to over 1,100 stores and $40B in sales over the same two decades. In sharp contrast to Welch, Marcus and Blank adopted a more collegial style of management. Store managers, often promoted from within had latitude in how they operated individual outlets. Their structure was decentralised and “loose.” They fostered an entrepreneurial culture with a relentless focus on the customer. Floor staff were experienced in the trades, contractors themselves, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and well paid.

In 2000 paths collide.

Despite proving himself as one of America’s top operational executives, Welch selected Jeff Immelt over Nardelli. As it happens, a board member of GE was a founding investor in Home Depot, which had just posted slowing growth figures for the year. Nardelli was snapped up on a massive salary package, tasked with reinvigorating growth in what was now America’s second-largest retailer. That’s how highly regarded GE executives were. The other who lost out on succession of Welch, James McNerney, strode straight into the CEO suite of 3M, one of America’s biggest companies.

He quickly set about replicating what he had learned over decades at GE. First, cost cutting. Expensive hourly full time floor staff were cut. In their place, inexperienced part timers. Staff benefits were cut. He invested $1B in inventory management and self-checkout systems. Billions more in a new division targeting professional contractors. And he clamped down in the free-wheeling style of Home Depot, firing executives and streamlining divisions. Executives were subject to the GE-style rank and yank. Eventually 98 percent of executives had been replaced, many with GE alumni. He tightly controlled operations. Nardelli drove efficiency. By the numbers. By the spreadsheet.

It worked. Over the next five years 1,000 new stores opened, revenue doubled to $80B, and earnings per share rose 20 percent. Yet, the share price flatlined around $40. Wall Street infuriated Nardelli. Irrespective of stellar numbers, over his tenure Home Depot shares fell 8 percent. Nardelli’s style and decisions alienated employees and customers alike—and eventually shareholders. 

More than that. Home Depot, it’s reputation built on customer service, plunged to the bottom of the annual American Consumer Satisfaction Index produced by the University of Michigan. Customers griped about the lack of knowledgable staff and the absence of enough coverage on the retail floor.

It came to a head in January of 2007 when Nardelli resigned. He took a $210M diamond-encrusted golden parachute that similarly pissed off shareholders and employees alike.

“Many of my Home Depot co-workers celebrated Nardelli’s resignation,” wrote Martha Parker in letter on 8 Jan 2007 published in the LA Times. In a Bloomberg piece on 15 January 2007: “It’s amazing the reaction of people on my floor. People are openly ecstatic. High-fiving,” said an Atlanta store operations manager. The share priced popped 3 percent on the news. Twenty years of Home Depot’s culture had been subjugated and suffocated. “My hope is that we can start a new chapter in our company and try to reclaim some of the greatness lost under Nardelli’s watch,” Dana Branch, 8 January 2007, LA Times.

Frank Blake, another GE executive brought into Home Depot by Nardelli around 2002, took the reins. Facing 350,000 demotivated staff, Blake considered his first address. It would set the tone. He came upon a book from which he read a passage on the live internal feed. The book, Built from Scratch, was the memoir of the founders, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank.

Blake recounted the story on the Tim Ferris podcast:

“I pick up the book, I flip madly through it to find something that I think is relevant, and in the book, they talk about the inverted pyramid and the leadership concept where the CEO is at the bottom and the customers and the front line associates are at the top. And so, I used that, reading from Built from Scratch and the inverted pyramid as my first communication to our associates. And then, for the next eight years as CEO, I spent time figuring out, what does that actually mean? How do you lead from an inverted pyramid perspective and what are the leadership lessons you pull from that?”

Inverting the Pyramid

Across the Atlantic in 1981, Jan Carlzon became president of Scandinavian airlines. Government owned, bureaucratic, and consistently late—it ranked 14 out of 17 European airlines for punctuality. And it was bleeding cash, headed for a second straight year of loss toward $20M. Even the flight attendants were embarrassed to say they worked for Scandinavian. Carlzon’s goal was simple: be the world’s best airline for the business traveller.

Carlzon intuited that frontline employees, those with direct contact with the customer, had to be decision makers. He writes in “Moments of Truth“:

Last year, each of our 10 million customers came in contact with approximately five SAS employees, and this contact lasted an average of 15 seconds each time. Thus, SAS is “created” 50 million times a year, 15 seconds at a time. These 50 million “moments of truth” are the moments that ultimately determine whether SAS will succeed or fail as a company. They are the moments when we must prove to our customers that SAS is their best alternative.

He goes on that SAS could not rely on a rulebook from corporate headquarters. That responsibility for actions and decisions must be placed with “the people who are SAS during those 15 seconds.” Ticket agents, flight attendants, and baggage handlers—all frontline employees.

What needed to happen, according to Carlzon, was an inversion of the hierarchical structure where the boss sends directives down the chain of command, relayed by middle managers, to the bottom of the pyramid, the frontline staff. By handing decision making power to those on the frontline creating the “moments of truth” with customers, middle managers roles become supporting, and the CEO supports those. In Carlzon’s words: “Seizing these golden opportunities to serve the customer is the responsibility of the front line. Enabling them to do so is the responsibility of middle managers.“

Carlzon doesn’t just issue an edict for decentralised decision making, he enables it. By setting a keen focus on the business traveller, he enables cost cutting from things not aligned with that goal. In turn freeing the resources for where they are needed—the front line. “All the employees received special training on providing service and, to many of them, the content of these courses was secondary to the fact that the company was investing time and resources in them. They had frequently gone unappreciated. Now they were in the limelight.”

It’s a radical re-think of what leadership means. Within a year of Carlzon’s term, Scandinavian airlines ranked number 1 for punctuality and in 1983 was awarded “Airline of the Year.”

What’s most interesting however about Carlzon is not the SAS turnaround, but how he came to this thinking. Before SAS, at age 32 in 1974, after six years of work, he was appointed president of Vingresor, a Swedish tour operator. He writes there was no obvious reason for his selection, that his qualifications were no better than anyone else’s, and, he was afraid of failure. It’s his first such appointment. He writes: “So I began acting the way I thought a boss should act. I straightened my tie and summoned my staff. One after another they trooped into my office, and I issued firm instructions about what was to be done.” He says he acted out the role of boss. He assumed everyone wanted him to make all the decisions, to come up with all the solutions. Carlzon admits he knew something was wrong, but it was one of his staff who stated frankly: you were appointed because of who you are not to become someone you aren’t.

That triggered a change in Carlzon’s thinking. He was there to create the atmosphere and conditions for others to do their jobs better. He writes: “I began to understand the difference between a traditional corporate executive, who issues instruction after instruction from the top, and the new corporate leader, who must set the tone and keep the big picture in mind.”

Leadership Antidote for Ailing Engagement

In 2026, Gallup polls show that workplace engagement globally hovers around 20 percent. And this is a high-water mark. Since Gallup began this poll, it’s never breached 23 percent. Think about that. We have accepted as normal that the overwhelming majority of people are not engaged at work—an activity on which we spend over half our waking hours. Next time you’re in the office, look to your colleague on the left, then on the right, and in spite of any other differences you may have politically or religiously or whether you eat a Snickers with a fork and knife, most likely you agree that at work you’re just showing up.

Countless management articles have been written about self-awareness and hubris, particularly as executives rise through an organisation. And trust, the lubricant of cooperation and collaboration in work and society is at all time lows. Edelman’s Trust Barometer, a global survey, says 68 percent of respondents believe that business leaders purposely mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations. For government leaders that’s 69 percent. That aligns with a Gallup poll in 2026 that revealed only 20 percent of people trust the leadership of their organisation.

Why is this so?

Simon Sinek offers a thought in “Leaders Eat Last.” There was a reason early human tribes established hierarchy. If everyone rushed in to eat from the hunt, the smallest would be elbowed in the face in the chaos. And over time that would severely harm cooperation in the tribe, limiting the ability of our species to survive and procreate. Hierarchy established that the bigger stronger males ate first. Weaker members of the tribe may not have the best parts of the deer, but they got to eat without their teeth being smashed out. The tribal contract however becomes: “when the group faces a threat from the outside, we expect the leader, who really is stronger, to be the first one to rush toward the danger to protect the rest of us.”

It’s the same reason that today we don’t begrudge the alphas in society: “We have no problem with someone who outranks us at work making more money than us, getting a bigger office or a better parking space… It is because of the advantages an alpha gets in a society that we are always trying to improve our own place in the pecking order.”What gets out collective goat though is when exorbitant riches are lavished on the few who then throw the rest under the bus. Sinek writes: “It has to do with this social contract deeply ingrained in what it means to be human. If our leaders are to enjoy the trappings of their position in the hierarchy, then we expect them to offer us protection. The problem is, for many of the overpaid leaders, we know that they took the money and perks and didn’t offer protection to their people. In some cases, they even sacrificed their people to protect or boost their own interests. This is what so viscerally offends us. We only accuse them of greed and excess when we feel they have violated the very definition of what it means to be a leader.”

An antidote to the engagement and trust crisis is seemingly age old. Strangely perhaps, the idea is not even radical. It’s less a leadership theory and more a way of being and acting, accessible to everyone, not just those with a leadership title. Maybe that is what makes it on one hand so powerful and on the other so easy to dismiss.

In 1970 Robert Greenleaf wrote an essay, The Servant as Leader. He articulates that in a servant leader the desire to serve precedes the aspiration to lead. Meaning that one leads not for the power of leadership, but as a manifestation of serving. Let’s be clear. The servant leader leads.

Greenleaf writes that “foresight” is a fundamental pillar of leadership. The leader must be aware of the “arc of history,” how past events influence the now, and how both feed into the future. He must be at once be “historian, contemporary analyst, and prophet.” So important is foresight that Greenleaf suggests: “The failure (or refusal) of a leader to foresee may be viewed as an ethical failure, because a serious ethical compromise today (when the usual judgment on ethical inadequacy is made) is sometimes the result of a failure to make the effort at an earlier date to foresee today’s events and take the right actions when there was freedom for initiative to act.” In fact, this is partly what qualifies the leader to “lead”, a sense for the “unknowable” and “unseeable.”

That foresight feeds “conceptualisation.” And it is conceptualisation that Greenleaf observes is the prime leadership talent. That is, vision, the long view. It is an absolute core of leadership to conceptualise the idea itself, the answer to “where are we going and why does it matter.” The leader must have these firm and believe in them enough to communicate these two points with clarity such that others can act upon that vision.

Carlzon’s view in practice is the same: “Indeed, the only solution for SAS’s predicament was to increase revenue. First we needed a clear picture of the outside world and of SAS’s position within it… you use your view of the big picture to formulate a strategy… What is required is strategic thinking, or “helicopter sense” — a talent for rising above the details to see the lay of the land.” Business strategy requires a leader to see the lay of the land, the market, the customer, and predict in some sense where megatrends are headed. This is the job of leadership. The leading part of leadership.

Only after that strategy was set and the vision to be the “world’s best airline for the frequent business traveller,” did Carlzon communicate this with the organisation: “we distributed a little red book entitled “Let’s Get in There and Fight” to every one of our 20,000 employees.”

At Home Depot in 2007, Frank Blake faced a dejected workforce. His vision was restoration built on customer service and investing in their employees, which he called ‘associates.’ Home Depot’s customer service ranking was in the toilet in 2005. On his first earnings call in May 2007, Blake, after laying out the “poor performance” figures, continued with this statement: “First, our associates have responded quickly and enthusiastically to the basic message that we are focusing on our retail business and reconnecting with the core values that are the foundation of the company. If anything, this has happened more rapidly than I anticipated and is a testament to the strength of the culture of this company and how deep-seated it is in our associates.“

Blakes strategic priorities are plainly articulated: “We will, however, stay on strategy and invest in our five key priorities: associate engagement; product excitement; shopping environment; product availability; and own the pro.” Associate engagement is #1 on that list: “we have taken a number of actions to change the way our associates are compensated, recognized and rewarded to make it clear that taking care of our associates is one of the core values of the company. We have also invested in associate hours on the store floor with a significant increase in payroll as a percent of sales. In the midst of the global financial crisis, Blake recognises his associates not just in platitude, but in dedicated investment strategy—putting your money where your mouth is: “we have rededicated ourselves to excellence in customer service.”