How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion
by Bernie Marcus
Recommended by Frank Blake
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Built from Scratch reads like a founder's blow-by-blow account of launching and scaling a retail business, full of first-hand anecdotes about hiring, vendor deals, and customer focus. The most useful part is the steady stream of concrete war stories that show day-to-day decision making and culture-building choices. The main limitation is a narrow, author-centered view: stories repeat themes, defensive asides surface, and practical frameworks or comparative data are scarce. If you want a tidy playbook or neutral analysis, this will feel uneven.
This summary and audience guidance are AI-generated from the book's description and its recommendation history, last updated June 2026. Recommendations, quotes and sources elsewhere on this page come from published material and are not generated.
One of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories of the past twenty years. When a friend told Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank that "you've just been hit in the ass by a golden horseshoe," they thought he was crazy. After all, both had just been fired. What the friend, Ken Langone, meant was that they now had the opportunity to create the kind of ...
Difficulty:easy
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View available editions on AmazonWhy recommended
Recommended by 3 sources and appears in Most Recommended Books, Business, and Nonfiction.
People and public figures who have recommended this book.
Recommendation proof is sourced from public posts, interviews, reading lists, and cited references.
Frank Blake
“Very meaningful to me, not only because it’s the story of the founding of the Home Depot, but also because of my start as the CEO of Home Depot.”
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Consider Accidental Presidents by Jared Cohen. Recommended by 10 sources.
“Accidental Presidents offers eight narrative portraits of men who succeeded to the U.S. presidency without election, using anecdote-rich scenes and readable context to show how personality and circumstance interact with office power. It’s strongest as a set of self-contained stories that make succession stakes concrete for non-specialist readers; it does not prioritize dense archival argument or exhaustive methodology, so expect some interpretive generalizations and repeated themes across cases. Use it for fast historical orientation rather than scholarly deep-dives.”
Each recommendation is collected from a public source — interviews, articles, or curated lists — and linked to its original URL. Books with many verifiable recommendations from respected people rank higher.
