From Aisle 3 to the Top

When Brian Dunn began working as a sales associate at Best Buy in 1985, the company had just a handful of stores, the clerks wore skinny leather ties, and VCRs constituted cutting-edge technology. But as Best Buy has grown—it now has more than 1,400 stores and 165,000 employees—Dunn has grown with it; since 2006 he's served as president and COO. In the latest of his series of interviews as part of NEWSWEEK's partnership with the Kaplan University M.B.A. program, NEWSWEEK chairman Richard M. Smith spoke with Dunn about leading in an ultracompetitive industry. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What do you recall of your first day at Best Buy?
DUNN: It was a Saturday. I hit the sales floor and proceeded to not really understand all the items I was trying to sell to the customers, and it was a series of very difficult exchanges. At the end of the day, the store manager came up to me and said, "How did it go?" I told him in very direct terms it was a lousy experience. The manager proceeded to talk to me about the Minnesota Twins, the Minnesota Vikings, fishing … He made it personal right away, and then he said, "Why don't you come in next Saturday morning and I'll teach you a little bit about how I operated on the sales floor." And it really made a difference. What stuck with me from that was that the store manager was talking to me about what I was capable of doing here, and was willing to give of himself to help.

People at Best Buy talk about "consumer centricity." What does that mean?
[Not] all retailers are customer centric, and I think on our best days we are. People get it confused with customer service … For me, customer centricity is taking you as a human being—your wants, needs, desires—and creating solutions.

Retailers typically have high turnover, so educating new employees is critically important. How do you do it?
We partner them up with people in the store already doing the role, and they spend time shadowing employees. We really put our new employees in a position where they become part of the store community, and our employees understand from day one how important that is.

Exactly how high is your turnover?
It's about 64 percent annually, and that's a number we're quite proud of. Four years ago it was over 100 percent, and we've been very systematically working on improving our employee experience and engaging our employees in a way that can bring those numbers down. Embedded in that big number are pretty interesting smaller numbers. Our store-manager turnover is in the teens. That's really important because the store managers are the architects of the environments they lead. Our full-time employee turnover is in the high 30 percent range, and that's a really important number because they're doing a lot of training.

Best Buy is very large, but what lessons have you learned there that you'd offer to a young startup with just a few employees?
There is intrinsic value in every single human being that works for you. One of the sayings I use is that "Together, we're a group of ordinary people who, when we really come together, can accomplish extraordinary things."