Troy Rice: It's More Important to Get It Right Than to Be Right [009]

Episode Description

Troy Rice started behind the counter of his stepdad's grocery store in Germantown, Tennessee, a town of ten thousand people with five grocers in it. The cashier there, Katherine Sanders, worked the register for thirty-two years and knew every customer's kids and every customer's brand of cigarettes. Troy calls her personalization before there was personalization. Thirty-five years later he is the CEO of PGA TOUR Superstore, he has half his executive team running their weekly business analysis through Claude, and he is spending twenty million dollars on technology he insists is there to make his people better, not fewer. The line from Katherine Sanders to that decision is the spine of this conversation.

Ron hired Troy at Toys “R” Us in 2006 and the two of them have been watching each other operate ever since, which is why this one goes places a normal guest interview does not. They take apart the Home Depot founder-to-optimizer transition and what it cost. They walk through the slow death of Toys “R” Us from the inside, down to the bathrooms and the fired janitors and the money that got dividend back out instead of invested. And Troy gives the rule he now runs a mostly new eleven-person leadership team by: it is more important to get it right than to be right. That sounds like a nice sentiment until you watch what happens to a company where nobody believes it.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.