20 | BUSINESS ALCHEMY
Running with
Wolves
Best Buy’s Julie Gilbert stares down skepticism to put women at the forefront of the world’s largest consumer electronics company. BY Allena Butal
The WOLF Vision It was a similar late night, a year prior, that Gilbert, who was a senior executive, had the vision for Best Buy’s Women’s Leadership Forum, or WOLF, of which she is founder. “I had visited a store in California, where many of the women employees stopped to hug me, and one employee told me that she was inspired to see a woman executive, knowing that one day it could be her,” she explains. “But then, later that same day, I had the wind knocked out of me. A male colleague told me that, while I was respected for my achievements in the company, there were some women who hated me for my success—and these were women executives, whom I didn’t even know, who were senior to me.” As Gilbert sat in her hotel thinking about the paradoxical messages she had received that day, she suddenly and
a movement among female employees that is committed to being a support network for women in the company and for Best Buy’s female customers. The response was staggering, and Gilbert found herself building the curriculum for the leadership program during offhours, often in the middle of the night. Within six months, she had three WOLF packs committed to innovating Best Buy’s business practices, building diversity networks, and supporting each other as women.
Meeting Resistance But the success of WOLF was not without resistance. “The minute I started trying to reinvent Best Buy to serve women, there were no limits on what people were willing to do to try to take me down,” Gilbert says. “I went from being very credible in the business to being accused of having poor values,
© Star Tribune
T
wo years ago, in the middle of the night, 37-year-old Julie Gilbert was wide-awake, watching her apartment door. Earlier that day someone had keyed her car in the massive parking lot of the Best Buy corporate headquarters, raking deep gauges from the hood to the trunk. The marks were especially deep on the driver’s side. Julie Gilbert, founder of Best Buy’s Women’s Leadership Forum Gilbert was furious and a little afraid— (WOLF), is putting women at the center of the company—from products she suspected that this was a deliberate to advertising to design. And, she’s seeing staggering results: In the past message from someone unhappy with her two years, women have increased Best Buy’s revenue by $3 billion. work building women’s leadership in the company. Unsure how to handle the situation, she inexplicably had a vivid memory of climbing trees as a child immediately headed back to her apartment so she could blow growing up in South Dakota. “In those branches, under the off steam rollerblading. She dropped her keys with the doorglow of the moonlight, I would look out at the horizon, and man on her way out, only to discover upon her return that one by one I would hear the howl of wolves calling each other. someone had stolen her office, car, and apartment keys and As I listened, I felt that each was saying, ‘I’m out here too,’” she left the remainder of her key ring in her apartment mailbox. recalls. “The calls of the wolves were like the lone voices of “I sat in my apartment all night with my eyes on that door women in business. And I knew that if all of these voices could knowing that at any moment, someone could enter and be linked, we could accomplish anything.” attack me,” she remembers. “I asked myself, ‘Why am I doing Immediately, she grabbed her computer and mapped out this work for women? What am I willing to risk—getting fired? a plan for what has become a new model for business both my personal safety?’ When my answer—‘I’m in this no matter in the US and internationally. The very next day she brought what’—came, I realized I was willing to risk just about anything a group of 30 Best Buy women employees together—the to help women and dramatically grow and reinvent a business.” first WOLF pack, as she calls them—to discuss her vision for