A local CEO on evolving on guns (and other values)
Certain things can be expected from a book written by a company’s CEO with a picture of a storefront of said company on the cover, along with a generic, open-ended title. A book, in some cases, can be judged by its cover. In “It’s How We Play the Game: Build a Business. Take a Stand. Make a Difference,” Dick’s Sporting Goods chairman and CEO Ed Stack breaks some of those conventions and shows how faulty such assumptions can be.
A first-time author whose company is headquartered in the Pittsburgh area, Mr. Stack crafts a compelling narrative about the company over which he presides — the one his father, Richard “Dick” Stack created in 1948 — and how those experiences have shaped his own life. In a genre that can frequently be staid, Mr. Stack’s corporate biography is deeply personal.
Much of the book is centered around the rise of Dick’s, from its humble beginnings as a small shop in Binghamton, N.Y., to the behemoth the younger Stack transformed it into, with 750 stores in 47 states and $9 billion in annual sales.
The story suffers at times from being dense in a way that appeals much more to a business-minded reader, primarily when it chronicles the processes of attracting outside investors, the company going public and smaller segments when he explains the layout of stores.
It excels, however, by making something that could have very easily been dry — an ongoing chronicle of a business and its CEO — refreshingly revealing.
While he admired his father, he had a complicated relationship with him. As is written in the book, the elder Stack never told his son he loved him. His insistence that his son work a weekend shift, although he had received permission from a superior to take off, forced him to miss his best friend’s wedding. Those kind of actions caused him to resent the store that eventually became his calling in life, so much so that he wrote, “As soon as I’d graduated, I’d be gone.” His father grew ill, though, and as the oldest son, he felt it was his responsibility to handle the family business.
Mr. Stack finds time and space to laud his own accomplishments. With a net worth of more than $1 billion and with the willingness to write a book, it’s understandable, especially since it’s not too self-congratulatory. He
“Maybe we were part of the problem. Maybe the fact that we did everything by the book didn’t matter. Maybe that was merely an excuse, a justification.”
— Ed Stack
delves into his shortcomings as well, from Dick’s expanding too quickly to nearly having to file for Chapter 11 to his divorce from his first wife. It’s a level of transparency that isn’t required from, or commonly seen, in such a book, but it added greatly to it, giving readers a more complete understanding of the author and how he came to become the man he is now.
Perhaps the book’s greatest relevance comes not from the story of Ed Stack’s life, but a retelling of one of the moments that has come to define it— the decision to no longer sell assault-style rifles at his stores, with about 40 pages of the book devoted to the topic.
It’s an issue Mr. Stack evolved on, beginning with the decision to pull the weapons from all Dick’s Sporting Goods stores but to continue to sell them at Field & Stream, a separate chain they own that specializes in hunting and fishing, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012. After the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in 2018, the much-publicized move to remove such guns from all stores was made, with $5 million worth of modern sporting rifles destroyed. Something, as he saw it, had to change.
“Maybe we were part of the problem,” Mr. Stack wrote. “Maybe the fact that we did everything by the book didn’t matter. Maybe that was merely an excuse, a justification.”
Using a healthy portion of a book to explain your actions could be seen as crass opportunism to a cynical observer or simply one operating in bad faith. If anything, Mr. Stack’s elaboration on why he and his company took the stand they did is commendable, a potential way to open and advance a conversation in a polarized country where mass shootings continue at an alarming rate.
It’s characteristic of the surprising openness seen throughout much of the book. When paired with interesting and humorous anecdotes about the company’s transformation over the years — including the self-awareness about jokes over a company named Dick’s selling, among other things, balls — Ed Stack’s first literary venture is an enjoyable one.