Welch had over the last 10 years built GE's stock price from 10 (adjusted for 
three stock splits) to 60, (that receded to 55 on word of his retirement), 
but has since then been cut in half. Meanwhile Home Depot's stock price is 
steady at around 40.  

==============================================
Thanks to Bob Miriani:

Home Depot

SOMETHING TO PROVE
Bob Nardelli was stunned when Jack Welch told him he'd never run GE. 
'I want an autopsy!' he demanded. 

FORTUNE
Monday, June 24, 2002
By Patricia Sellers 

The first big thing that Bob Nardelli wanted to be was a pro football player. 
But at 5-foot-10 and 195 pounds, he was the smallest guy on the line at 
Western Illinois University. "The rest of the world got bigger, and I didn't 
grow any more," he recalls. So he got practical about his future, earned a 
business degree, and took a job at General Electric, where his father had 
worked a lifetime in the factories. 

The second big thing that Bob Nardelli wanted to be was CEO of GE. Though 
never a blazing intellect, he logged the longest hours, tackled the toughest 
turnarounds, and became "the best operating executive I've ever seen," says 
Jack Welch, his former boss. But again, somebody outgrew Nardelli. "I had to 
go with my gut," Welch told him in November 2000 when he passed him over for 
the polished, Ivy League-educated Jeff Immelt. 

It's been said that luck is what you have left over after you give 100%. If 
that's true, Bob Nardelli never got his due until the day he lost the GE 
succession race. Minutes after the new CEO was announced, Nardelli, who was 
then in charge of GE Power Systems, got a call from Ken Langone, a GE board 
member who is also an influential director at Home Depot. "You probably could 
not feel worse right now," the raspy-voiced Langone boomed, "but you've just 
been hit in the ass with a golden horseshoe. And I've got the horseshoe." 
Within a week, Home Depot's board pushed out co-founder Arthur Blank and 
installed Nardelli as CEO. 

At first, Nardelli looked like a pretty lucky loser: Immelt, not he, was the 
one grappling with rampant criticisms of GE's accounting practices and a 
falling stock price (down 25% since Welch's departure last September). During 
Nardelli's first six months at Home Depot, investors cheered the new guy. The 
company's shares, at $39 when he arrived in December 2000, rose to $53 by the 
next May. But lately Nardelli hasn't been looking so lucky. "This is one of 
the most unpredictable periods in my 35 years," Nardelli, 54, says over 
breakfast at his Atlanta office, three days after he announced a 35% increase 
in Home Depot's first-quarter profits, beating the Street's expectations. 
Promptly the stock sank more than 10%--now it sells for about $40. "I can 
understand not getting rewarded," he says, "but I don't understand getting 
punished." 

Today Nardelli is having one hell of a time convincing investors that he's 
leading a go-go growth company. Rival Lowe's is stealing his customers and 
investor favor (see Street Life). Analysts worry about his aggressive efforts 
to transform Home Depot's legendary culture from loosey-goosey to 
disciplined--and to transform the business from an operator of big-box 
home-improvement stores to a multidimensional provider of goods and services. 
Some say his goal of increasing sales from $53 billion in 2001 to $100 
billion in 2005 is too ambitious. Others wonder whether Nardelli is the right 
guy to lead the company. Not only is he the first executive without retailing 
experience ever to become CEO of a major nonfood retailer, he is also one of 
the very few outsiders to take over a well-known company from a founder. 

But don't count the new CEO out. The essential thing to know about Bob 
Nardelli is that he is driven by much more than a simple desire to see his 
company excel. He's also driven by a burning personal need: to prove that 
Jack Welch picked the wrong guy. 

If you spend time with Nardelli, inevitably he will cite his core belief: 
"There is an infinite capacity to improve upon everything you do." That faith 
in human performance has guided him his entire life. An average student, 
Nardelli got B's and C's in school, but he hustled and excelled outside the 
classroom. He was an altar boy, a Boy Scout, a star athlete, editor of the 
yearbook, a class officer, and an ROTC cadet. At Western Illinois, no 
football player prepped harder than Nardelli, the co-captain and fierce 
offensive guard. "He was always the first in to study the films of the 
games," says his coach, Bob McMahan. "He was one of the few kids who really 
cared that he was carrying his load and doing right." Football gave Nardelli 
his first lesson in Six Sigma quality control, which became his gospel at GE: 
"Everybody had to do his job impeccably well. A case of 'we all win or we all 
lose.' " 

Nardelli sold his motorcycle to raise the cash to buy an engagement ring for 
his college girlfriend, Sue, and they married in 1971, the year they 
graduated. And after rejecting the idea of becoming a football coach because 
he was wary of the unpredictability of the profession, Nardelli started at GE 
that same year at the lowest salaried level, as a $9,600-a-year manufacturing 
engineer. He worked his way up, taking night MBA classes at the University of 
Louisville. Jack Welch, who met Nardelli in the late 1970s, says that the 
young man hounded him relentlessly about Nardelli's own performance. "He 
would always say, 'What am I doing that I need to do better?' " In 1988, 
Welch refused to give Nardelli, then a manufacturing VP, a general management 
job. Nardelli quit. "The issue is not between you and I," he told Welch when 
Welch tried to persuade him to stay. "It is what is between you and I." 
...His point was that he needed a business to run to prove he was a worthy 
contender for CEO of GE. 

Nardelli spent the next three years as an executive vice president at 
Wisconsin-based industrial-equipment maker Case, where he ran the worldwide 
parts and then the construction divisions. He returned to GE in 1991 to run 
the company's appliance business in Canada--and was on the CEO track at last. 
Within the year, Nardelli got the top job at GE Transportation, where he 
showed the right stuff. In three years he pacified hostile unions, modernized 
the product line, expanded into services, took the business global, and more 
than doubled profits. He abided by the one firm request that Sue Nardelli has 
made in these past 31 years of marriage: that they never live overseas. But 
he globetrotted all the time. "He was everywhere getting orders--Africa, 
Mexico, China, Eastern Europe," says GE alum Larry Johnston, who has known 
Nardelli for 20 years and is now CEO of food retailer Albertson's. Still, 
Nardelli has never missed a summer vacation with Sue and their four kids, now 
ages 16 to 27. Welch calls Nardelli "the perfect dad and perfect husband."