Is the Home Depot Ship Changing Course?

Implications: Articles on Nardelli being paid too much or not shareholder friendly abound.  This article goes further into the direction of Home Depot and the General Electric way of doing things.  Changing a cowboy culture and cutting costs were seen by Nardelli as the right thing.  Will that course continue?  How much change is needed? 

Analysis:  When you get as large as Home Depot, what do you do next?  If you come at it from the GE mentality, you fine tune what you have, put order and structure in place, get rid of the cowboys, cut costs, and find new ways to grow outside of your core business.  Of course, in the meantime the culture that got you there goes away.  That to some degree is what HD is faced with. On the store level as David Olive points out in the article, part timers replaced knowledgeable sales people, and the store managers , closest to the customers, had their input decreased.  At the HD Supply group, new home sales fell through the floor and the pain for all of housing, in my opinion, has yet to be totally felt in the marketplace.
 So, with that being said, what changes will be needed to get the ship back on course?  None that are cheap when it comes to the big box stores.  Updating and brightening for starters, and at least some level of returning knowledgeable anchors to each department.  Anchors that can pass on a level of customer service and product expertise to new full time and part time employees.  And last but not least, input by the store managers in their local market gives back at least some degree of ownership.
 For HD Supply(the contractor yards), I think Nardelli did the right thing.  He bought large, successful companies, and let the management continue to service a group of customers that the boxes had not(and would not) be successful supplying.  Its the one thing that offers great growth opportunities.  There will be short term pain until the market comes back,(Q2/08) but there is large payback for the consolidation in this channel.