Marek Fuchs
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If you ever read a profile of The Business Press Maven that portrays me as committing an act of kindness for a little person, a member of the great unwashed, don't rush out to buy stock in me just yet. Be mindful that a reporter was tagging along with me when I did the good deed for the little miscreant, and I knew it would make a good anecdote, even a lead. Maybe the reporter wasn't even around. I could have extended the kindness in full public view, knowing that a reporter would use the second- or third-hand tale as an anecdote, even a lead. Enter a Barron's puff-file of Frank Blake, the new chief executive of the embattled Home Depot (HD Quote - Cramer on HD - Stock Picks). And let The Business Press Maven say, Blake might be a good, modest man. He might even, like Mother Teresa, one day be put on the fast track to canonization. But all that matters to investors is, in very specific terms, what he plans to do to turn Home Depot around -- and in a troubled housing market, no less. That's why a storyline built around a worshipful single anecdotal lead about how a current leader is a good guy -- and so unlike the last guy -- can mislead investors like little else.He's No Nardelli
Chief executives often define themselves by who they are not: the people before them, those bums who not too long ago were the subject of their own puff-files but were eventually thrown out by the seat of their pants. Here, Blake has been working overtime -- and the business media have fallen into the familiar role of stenographer -- to tell us that he is good people, unlike the discredited former CEO Robert Nardelli, infamous for being imperial. Cue the lead anecdote, soon to be followed by more gushing and hardly anything on which investors can safely hang their portfolios:Frank Blake, the brand-new chief executive of Home Depot Inc., recently approached a nearly full table in the company's cafeteria with his lunch tray in hand and asked if he could join. Sorry, he was told, the one open seat was being saved for someone. For many high-powered bosses, that could have been an outrageous slight. But it rolled right off Blake. In his case, friends say, it's a revealing story of a new type of Home Depot chief who won't take himself too seriously as the nation's second-largest retail [chain] ends an era of arrogance in the CEO office.The truths of the middle-school lunch table live on, at least according to Barron's.
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