Dick’s Sporting Goods’ Ed Stack on leadership, mistakes and vision

During the NRF Foundation Honors in January, the 2024 Visionary Award — the National Retail Federation’s highest honor — was presented by NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay to Dick’s Sporting Goods Executive Chairman Ed Stack. In an onstage fireside chat with Shay the next morning during NRF 2024: Retail’s Big Show, Stack talked about his insights and experiences guiding a company that began as a pair of bait-and-tackle shops and went on to become a Fortune 500 company, the largest omnichannel sporting goods store in the United States.

Stack’s father started the company with $300 borrowed from his grandmother. Stack purchased the company from his father in the early 1980s for more than that, but with a similar vision: the American dream.

“It was pretty simple,” Stack said. “Make payroll, put a roof over his family’s head and the families of those who worked with him.” The lesson Stack said he learned: There would be ups and downs.

The company grew one store at a time. Sometimes it grew too quickly; the company almost went out of business in 1987 during the savings-and-loan crisis, and nearly did so again in 1995. “We made some stupid decisions,” Stack said, from which he and his colleagues learned an important lesson: “You’ll learn more from your mistakes than you will from your successes.”

He added, “And we’ve learned a lot, because we made a lot of mistakes.” Being able to learn from mistakes is its own kind of skill. “When you think you’re making a mistake, or when you know you’re making a mistake, stop. Don’t try to make your mistake be the right thing.”

Do the right thing

“Retail is always changing,” Stack said. “One of the things I don’t think people understand about retail is the complexity of it across so many different disciplines.” Whether it’s merchandising, supply chain, marketing or technology, Stack pointed out that people in this business are asked to solve some difficult problems. And Dick’s has changed the way they go about solving them a number of times.

Stack credits part of the team’s success to that adaptability. “We never fell in love with ourselves. We were constantly trying to innovate and change and stay ahead of the game, and the team that we have has been great at being able to do that,” he said.

One thing Stack and his colleagues have done that has really helped the business stay on track and do what it needs to do is what he calls a diamond-shaped organizational chart.

“My name is always at the bottom of the org chart,” Stack said. “My job is to make sure the people that work directly with me have all the resources and tools they need to do a great job.”

The same thing applies to the people who report to them, and so on up the ladder. At the very top — the peak of the diamond — is the customer, or, as they are known around Dick’s Sporting Goods, the athlete. “The further you get from the athlete,” Stack said, “the more you should listen and the less you should talk.”

Who the public trusts

Moving on from this concept, Shay raised a question: In a time of loud debate and plentiful ambivalence, who does the public trust? Not nonprofits, he said. Not the government. But they trust business leaders, and they hold them accountable: for how they run their business, how they treat their employees, and how they treat the communities they serve.

“We felt it was important on certain issues to really step up,” Stack said.

There have been, in the United States in recent years, a number of incidents in which a heavily armed shooter invades a public school. In 2012, a 20-year-old shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Six years later, in Parkland, Fla., 17 people were killed in a similar attack.

Shooting is a sport, and Dick’s Sporting Goods sells goods and equipment for it. After Sandy Hook and Parkland, “we made some very different decisions,” Stack said. The company stopped selling assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines and stopped selling guns to people under 21. “We knew there would be some real blowback from that, and there was,” Stack said.

But after listening to kids who survived the Parkland attack and parents who lost a child, the decision was clear. What’s more, store records revealed that months before the attack in Parkland, Dick’s Sporting Goods had sold the shooter a gun. Not one of the guns used in the attack, but to the same person. “We knew the system was broken,” Stack said, “so we needed to step up and make some changes.” 

The conversation pivoted to Stack’s commitment to young people and addressing educational inequality, and how important sports can be in giving kids an opportunity to grow and learn. In response to the decline in sports programs in public high schools around the country, Dick’s Sporting Goods created the Sports Matter program. The company is celebrating its 75th anniversary by giving away 75 grants of $75,000 to youth sports organizations around the country.

The need, Stack said, is clear: “I don’t remember every teacher I ever had,” he said, “but I remember every coach I ever had.”