The Green Collar
(Jan. 16, 2007)

What did Bob Nardelli win as he left the executive suite at Home Depot Inc.?

Media reports on Jan. 3 and 4 pegged his personal take-away at $210 million as he agreed to have the door shut behind him. So, clearly, he was rewarded with a big pile of Benjamins, which might stack even higher before all is said and done. Home Depot's stock price (affecting unexercised options) went up by 2 percent on the day his departure was announced.

But, does he walk away from a company that is stronger than when he arrived? The Wall Street Journal said Home Depot's stock price decreased by 8 percent on Nardelli's watch. Home Depot's biggest rival, Lowe's, climbed by 188 percent during the same period.

The breakingviews.com column in the Journal called Nardelli's exit package "one of the greatest payments for failure ever."

The New York Times reported that Nardelli's conduct of the 2006 annual meeting for Home Depot - at which he flew solo, without the board of directors in attendance - paved the way for intense shareholder dissatisfaction. Already generating substantial skepticism about his leadership of the firm - and his proclivity for personal enrichment - Nardelli infuriated investors by limiting individual questions that could be raised at the meeting to one minute each.

As a result, Nardelli generated an unheard-of statistic in corporate America - 32 percent of shareholders in attendance withheld support for the chairman and chief executive officer.

Nardelli began to understand that his outsized pay package had become a lightning rod. So, last June, according to the Wall Street Journal, he offered the compensation committee of Home Depot's board a one-page list of perquisites that he was willing to relinquish. Among the concessions was his personal use of Home Depot's six corporate jets. But he wasn't going to give up his guaranteed $3 million annual bonus.

So, post-Nardelli, Home Depot begins anew with its corporate positioning - trying to close the books on an era in which one of America's foremost blue-collar retailers was sullied by white-collar greed, and indifference to how their core customers might feel about it.

-- Jim Wisuri