YouSaid · the spoken record

Frank Blake

lines on the record
114
first
2018-03-15
most recent
2018-03-15
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Washington's very close little culture, and I wanted just to get out of that closed culture. And Schennectity, New York sounded like the far end of the earth.”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “There were two things. The first just as scene setter is it is the case I have never made as a salary more money than I made as a lawyer. So I did more with my draw from a law firm than through to being CEO of the Home Depot. So it was a very good legal practice. The problem with legal practice after a while that you realize is there's such a disincentive for any kind of efficiency, right? Somebody comes in with a problem and you go, I know this problem, I can name this tune in free notes. Well, no, actually that's not what's not the business model. You want to say, oh, boy, that's a complex symphony. That's going to be 3,000 notes. And so the idea of trying to do something that's cumulative rather than billing your time by the hours really would appeal to me. And Washington is a very”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “I was the beneficiary of the way GE did HR. So basically they moved people around every eighteen months, but they never bothered to move the lawyers because they're not going to bother to move the lawyers. So after about five or six years, I'm the person around the table who sort of knows how the business works. And I've listened to this and I've observed over time. And they offered me a job going onto the business side and then the rest of it. Being a lawyer is great, having been a lawyer is even better. So I really enjoyed the business side and found it much, much more fascinating than the legal side.”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “I'm probably an awful lot accidental. So the first part accidental was a group of us set up our own law firm. So there are twelve of us who set up our own law firm and that was kind of my first experience with entrepreneurial activity. I could say I was singularly bad. The firm did great. Most of my instincts about how to do it, actually looking back was pretty funny because I was wrong. So that was an introduction to entrepreneurial activity. I left Washington to go to GE to be the general counsel of a business in Schenectady, New York, and everybody thought that's the stupidest thing we've ever heard. Why would you leave Washington? A great legal practice and go to Schenectady. And mostly it was by that time I was kind of sick of politics. And”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “You start by the issues are so interesting. You think you can impact people's lives. Power is a fascinating thing. And so politics is a source of power and it's fascinating because of it.”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I was interested in politics, so I worked on campaigns. When I got out of college, I worked in the state legislature in Massachusetts after I went to law school. I then ended up in Washington, D.C. I had a very traditional Washington, D.C. lawyer government career moved back and forth from private practice and into the government. Politics fascinated me. I was interested in politics.”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Factual recall. Yeah. Very, very good. And very storytelling. So you just go, wow, I had no idea that there was that much interesting going on in their life. You know, they had a twin sister and the twin sister ran away with the grocery man and, you know, it was just all that kind of detail. Fascinating stuff.”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “So we had a big party and we had lots of relatives, lots of our friends. She's the kind of person who, if you say mention any name, she will know exactly what that person's father did, what their sister did. She'll have a backstory that will go on for 15 or 20 minutes. She works the phone constantly. She did that growing up, and she's done that even to the age of 100. She's sharp as a tag”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “I grew up right outside of Boston, Massachusetts, a family of five. I was the fourth of five, unfortunately my three older siblings have died. My mom, though, just had her 100th birthday and still lives in the house I grew up in. Had a great, very family-oriented experience growing up, very close family. And we have a lot of relatives in the area. So New England's sort of home still.”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Does that actually mean? How do you lead from an inverted pyramid perspective and what are the leadership lessons you pull from that? So yes, hugely important book. It's a great book. Unfortunately, it's out of print, but I'm sure I can get it for anybody who wants it.”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Do you have any thoughts on what I should say? And first, you said, wow, Dad, good luck. And then the second thing he said was, I don't know what you should say, but I can tell you how I start every store meeting in my store. I said, great, what do you do? And he said, I take Bill from scratch and I read from it. I'll read a passage from it. And I go, this is brilliant. And so I pick up the book, I flip madly through it to find something that I think is relevant. And in the book, they talk about the inverted pyramid and a leadership concept where the CEO is at the bottom and the customers and the frontline associates are at the top. And so I use that reading from built from scratch and then verted pyramid as my first communication to our associates. And then for the next eight years as CEO, I spent time figuring out what”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “There were no moments of driving along in the darkened night, thinking, Oh, what would I do if I were running this place? It was completely unprepared. And then, like a lot of retailers, we have a way of communicating to our associates at the time, Home Depot had around 350,000 associates. We have little TV that we beam in messages to the break rooms. And I have to go and address the 350,000 associates singularly unprepared. At the time, my son, Home Depot's program of returning veterans giving them jobs in the store, my son was an returning Iraq veteran, Iraqi war veteran, had come back, had been an assistant store manager, was now a store manager at Home Depot. And so I gave him a call and I said, Frank, his same name as I said, Frank,”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “My connection with the book is it's very meaningful to me, not only because it's the story of the founding of the Home Depot, but also because My start as the CEO of Home Dep Did not have a background that would lead anyone to think that I'd ever be the CEO of the Home Depot. In fact, when the board called me and said, we want you to be the CEO, I said you ought to take a day and think about this because while I had been at Home Depot for a few years, I had not been really doing a lot of the retail work. I've been doing M&A activity in real estate and that kind of thing. And I said, you ought to spend a day, think about it, and think about hiring a real retailer, and I need to think about it. Obviously, they call back at the end of the day. They still offered me the job. I obviously took the job, but I can honestly say that a nanosecond”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “First, your research is great. Absolutely right. That's very exciting that the book is important to you. As you'll hear, it's hugely important to me. First, the book is the story of Home Depot. It was written by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank and about Bernie and Arthur and Ken Langone and their founding of Home Depot. It's one of the great entrepreneurial stories of our century of our times because Bernie and Arthur had been fired from their prior job Can Langone said to them when they got fired you just got hit by a golden horseshoe in the ass, you're so lucky and then they went and established the Home Depot which was the most successful retail concept of its time fastest to $10 billion $20 billion $30 billion $40 billion.”

    2018-03-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #303: How to Do Crazy Good Turns -- Frank Blake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT