It's a great introduction to Corey .>> So weird to watch herself on video .>> [ LAUGHS ]>> Very disconserding .>> But they do, I want to go back to that because it's sort of a little bit of your childhood here. And it sounds super interesting, but I know it's also kind of hard for you .>> Yes, art is an amazing gift, and my parents believed deeply in what they did. They believed the world was a better place. When you had art in it, and anyone in here who's ever been self employed, there's this misnomer that like you have control of your schedule. My parents worked all the time, morning, noon and night because all they had to do is walk downstairs. So I'd be yelling down dad, I wanna play Monopoly And he'd be like, play by yourself. Not fun, by the way. [ LAUGH ] And I loved the passion and the ethic that they had. But it's very organic. You don't know where th enext meal is coming from. You're at the whim of someone else liking your art. People say very rude things about your art like, I could go home and paint that myself. It's not, like for real people stand there and say that, I'm like really could you. It's not easy. And for me it definitely made me crave some more structure and an ability to just kind of know where the next meal was going to come from. In a small town everyone knows when you have the hippie parents who don't make any money and you know you're standing in line with the free lunch card. So you chose a completely different path. You became an accountant. You like spreadsheets? Yeah. You spend 20 years at the same company. Yeah. It sounds like you purposely chose a different path for yourself. You don't always know that you're doing that. I mean, look, I'm probably the only person on earth whose parents were really disappointed when I said I wanted to go be an accountant. [ LAUGHTER ] you know. You're the man all of a sudden. Yup. My dad was like, you're gonna go work for the man. I was like, Dad I kinda am the man. Right? [ LAUGHTER ]. But it genuenly. You know they had these huge hopes for perhaps picking a path that I think They felt like would change the world. And now, interestingly, that is exactly, I believe fundamentally, what my path has allowed me to start on the path to do. Well, at Best Buy, I mean, you have been there for 20 years. But it has, ironically, been anything but stable. And you were key to the turnaround that really sort of set you off on your path to CEO. So Set the stage a little bit. What was going on at the time? Yeah, so it's 2012 and it was a tough time for Best Buy. You know, we came to work one day and literally got the star everyone email that said, your CEO is leaving. And the stock price was down, we didn't have a replacement CEO immediately. It's difficult when you're at an organization that you fundamentally believe can do amazing things for people, and yet at the same time has made so many mistakes. And for me in 2012 it was so frustrating, to know we could be doing so much better and then the fall of 2012 you barely came in, who had no background in retail. He came From Carlson begun late travel stock price took another 20 % dive when he came. And, and literally probably one month and 15 meetings in I thought, well now here's a breath of fresh air. And maybe for those of us who fundamentally believe There is a way to move this thing and we just one quarter after another. We were big on what we call the say do ratio. We would talk about what we were going to accomplish. We would go make progress against it, and then we would update people on it and we just did it and. Did it and did it. Momentum is huge in retail one hundred twenty thousand people starting to believe in something all of a sudden they can catch fire before you know it. So, why did you decide to stay through this period. Yeah, this was interesting. I mean genuinely people were coming in our stores and saying they didn't want to buy warranties because they didn't think we'd be in business. Your friends and family are calling and saying what are you doing? We talked a lot about purpose at Best Buy and that is the purpose of the company but importantly it is also our purpose as leaders. And my purpose is one of stewardship. I believe strongly in leaving the company better, my family better, the community better, because I was there every day I literally sit in the car on my way home and try to think through why was best buy better today. And if your purpose is stewardship, then leaving when things are bad is the ultimate crime. For me that felt like I was running away from something that I should be there fundamentally to fix. So how did you ultimately the fate of the Comp USAs, the Circuit Cities. I mean you are The only consumer electronics company of your size left. Yeah. There were a few things that we collectively did and put our stake in the ground. Number one was embracing the idea of showrooming. Showrooming had a really negative connotation, meaning people would come into the store, they'd look at the TVs, they'd go home, they'd buy them on Amazon, they'd get shipped. And instead we said if you're going to go through all the work to come to the store and look at the TV, let us just price competitively or will match anyone else's prices and just take it home with you. It's way easier than trying to ship it. And that idea of taking the big pill on pricing competitively all the time and matching whenever you needed to and embracing people coming into the store and working with our associates. Was really a big deal at the time. We also embraced our vendor partnerships, and we said we are the last major scale consume electronic supplier. We're the only ones who can showcase billions of dollars of R and D And partnering with them to say help us bring this, help us make this better, was a huge moment. And finally we just invest in the experience. It turns out when you go to an online site and you search, you'd like actual results that are relevant to come back. So we thought we'd invest in that. [ LAUGH ] And it sounds funny but you've got to divert hundreds of millions of dollars to your digital experiences and then also find ways to devote hundres of millions of dollars to your store associates and pay them better. And we did that by pulling out a billion five and cost. And we pulled the cost out in a way that actually allowed us to have more front line labor better paid but to streamline some of the back end. So, you've talked about to how you want Best Buy to be the chief technology officer for your home. What does that mean? Homes are getting more complex. I mean there's something very interesting happening often when I'm meeting with analysts investors, they'll say But wait. Technology is getting simpler I can just pull out of the box and set it on the counter. Well, that one thing, yes, but if you'd like that one thing to talk to anything else in your home, you're completely out of luck. Everyone has competing ecosystems, there is no one ecosystem that's winning. The number one ecosystem for TV's is the manufacturer, for computer's it's Windows, for phones it's Android. I mean. every one of us is trying to stitch together experiences and by the way, We don't even understand the cool things our homes can do for us, or the cool things we can do when we're on the road. We want to be that person who helps you unleash the cool, and just makes the stuff work for you when you want it to. So a new area that you're also getting to is health, and this feels like you're First big new announcement. Are you concerned about the competitiveness in the space? How are you going to do something differently than everybody else? So, health is like everyone wants to say health. Every day, there's a new release about health. We spend a great deal of time analyzing both the market we play in and the broader consumer dynamic. We. Again, our purpose as a company is to enrich people's lives with the help of technology. Fundamentally under that, we believe we can help seniors age in their homes longer with the help of technology. I have a 100 year old grandma And I'm on the road a lot. And you're the caregiver. I am the caregiver for the most. Well my husband to be fair does a lot of the work. But it's difficult. I don't know exactly if she got up, did she take her medicine? With a simple asortment of sensors in her home and an Alexa, I can completely change her day. I can know if she got onto bed, I know if she was up 50 times last time, I know if she opened the fridge. I as a caregiver have a better sense of what's going on. All of this enabled with technology. The world, and technology in the world is changing so rapidly and the idea that our health is going to be disrupted and I call it in a positive way, by health, is a very real one. And we feel this focus on an aging population. Look, I mean 10, 000 people are turning 65 every day. It's a population that's going to grow by 50 percent and 20 years. There's going to be a lot of people who would like to take better care of themselves and their loved ones. So I have I'm gonna go to questions in a second but first I wanna ask you said this summer your named CEO and you became the youngest female Fortune 500 CEO. You've had 15 different roles at Best Buy including most recently CFO but early on in your career, in an assessment you were told You are a risk to the organization. [ LAUGH ] How. It's on paper I have it. How did you get over that? Not well for the first couple days. [ LAUGH ] I think in any moment like that every one of us, there is a flight or fight response. You can either decide I am going to turn tail and run from this, which sometimes looks like I don't believe it or I'm not going to acknowledge it or I am just going to go somewhere else. Or you can decide somewhere in here there is a nugget of truth. Somewhere in here there are things I need to work on And I fundamentally took the ladder path and I buckled down and said, What are those attributes that might be leading to me to be seen as a risk and how do i i proactively push myself against those and try to come out the other side a better leader? And ultimately in the next leadership assessment, I brought my own development plan said I heard you hear all the things I'm working on, and here's where I've made progress. So did you expect to get the CEO job? [ LAUGH ] It's so interesting. If you had asked me five years ago, my answer would have been no and that's not even on the horizon But I wanted the CEO job and I worked hard to acquire the skills that I thought would get me ready for it. And so I don't think anyone at the end of the day, really expects someone to look you in the eye and say, you are going to be the CEO of a $ 43 billion company. But at the same time, I have a lot of confidence in the skills and experience that I put together. That I'm the right person for the role. Great. Do we have any questions in the audience? Right over here. If you could just wait for the mic and tell us who you are. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Good morning. Christy Rodriguez, Nationwide Financial. I think it's just thrilling that you're going down the healthcare path. Can you tell us a little bit if you're thinking about collaborations or partnerships to execute on that? Yeah. I think the only way that ultimately you're going to make progress in healthcare is to make collaborations. We've made threee aquisitions in the last year. Our first was of a company called Great Call, Which provides devices that are geared toward aging seniors. The have what they call caring centers, which are call centers that are staffed by very specificallly trained associates. Who helped meet the needs of seniors. The acquisitions were the first step and kind of closing the loop on some of the capabilities we think we need in order to work in the space like you're going to work with seniors It sure is helpful to have a whole population of people who understand what it means to work with seniors. From here, it's a question of how do you scale the business? And likely there's a consumer side of the business where we sell stuff and we have services and that we know well. There's also the commercial side of the business meaning can we partner with insurers in a way that will actually offer these services as part of an insurance suite of services because, one, they're great for the patient, and two, they actually pull meaningful cost out of the system. [ UNKNOWN ] another question over here. Serance Rotski, Chicago. I shop everything I have at my house from your store. Aw, thank you. Your people are wonderful. You didn't mention Geek. I asked for a lifetime membership to Geek. They didn't- I can make that happen for you. Anybody wants a lifetime membership to Geek supply, I Okay. Do this. Thank you. Do we have another. Where's, do we have a mic handler somewhere. Right over there. We'll go to that question. Thank you. Hi. I'm Maria Chavez with the National Council on Aging. You're talking my love language here. So many things that are prompting my question today. One, the reason I love being here is that women are going to make this better for everyone. And the 10, 000 people turning 65 every day 54 % are women. And a girl 10 years old today has a 50 % chance of living to 110. So this is the future. So I would encourage your leadership to continue, I think it's fabulous. And I think we need to talk only about technology keeping seniors and older adults in the home, but how we're gonna use this technology platforms, to get them into new jobs, new careers. If they're gonna live to 85 and work, then they're gonna need all the devices to help them with that. Well, and social isolation is also a very real face. So how you connect an aging population who may wanna age in their homes. But has trouble perhaps connecting with others. There is a whole suite of tools that technology can help enable to help them build their active price of the workforce or that they are connected to their friends. Thanks. So I want to end by just asking you. I have heard that you hate being on stage. That you are introvert and you just hate. Well, clearly, I think we are skeptical of that But how have you gotten over that fear? Public speaking or being on stage is a very learned behavior. An introvert means I get my energy from being alone. It doesn't mean I don't like other people. It just means that when it's dinnertime, I'll be like, thanks for the invite, team, I'm going home. I said that to my husband, too, he doesn't respond as well. [ LAUGH ] This idea of practice And I mean, I'll be honest about Matt Freeman who leads our Communication Department is here. And you have to be willing to stand alone, on stage in front of your best communications person, and take all the feedback in the world. And then work to get better. People have asked me what's the biggest surprise about being CEO And for me, it's been the amount of feedback you get and how many places you get it. [ APPLAUSE ] But here's what I would tell you. You know what I believe? I believe that means I'm doing the job right, cuz if no one was telling me how I could be better If no one was helping to create a better solution, if it was helping me in the moments when I'm on stage, then I am not helping the company be as amazing as it could be. I'm not helping unleash the strengths of others. And so, you know, the minute you're not getting feedback or not feeling uncomfortable, then something different as well. So if you're a CEO, be prepared to get lots of feedback. In summary yes. Corey thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you. [ APPLAUSE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

How Corie Barry Climbed the Ladder at Best Buy

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Best Buy’s CEO details her rise and the future of the company.
