Why Didn't Jamie Dimon Run Home Depot?
David Rosenthal says Jamie Dimon did not run Home Depot because a long courtship never became a hire. After Arthur Blank became chief executive, the board looked outside for the next leader and put Dimon first on the list. He had just been fired by Sandy Weill at Citigroup. Dimon later told the hosts, on stage at Radio City, that he loved the Home Depot founders. He also said he had barely been in a store. A friend sent him to one upstate, and he felt he was pretending to be in the home-improvement business.
The company spent about six months meeting him and trying to recruit him. He liked the culture, including the habit of calling headquarters the Store Support Center. At the end of those six months the board still had nobody, and the search moved on.
