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Chairman and CEO of The Home Depot, Robert L. Nardelli, will step down.  He attempted to bring Six Sigma and many other GE styles of leadership to The Home Depot and was blind sided by a wave of changes in the ways that companies are held accountable these days.

Nardelli operated under the principle that if you take care of the numbers everything else will work itself out.  But in an era that has seen Enron come and go and is now rife with stakeholders of every size, shape, stripe and belief, modern day CEO's of public companies, especially high profile companies have to be more like Bill Clinton and still achieve results like Jack Welch.

The Home Depot's stock has not done as well as it could have despite many areas of improvement.  Nardelli's pay was always an area of contention with the board and stock holders.  Its possible that a retail giant just can't support a salary like a multi-national conglomerate such as GE.  Too many CEO's look at the title and expect the world, just for accepting the job and before they have grown the company to a level that even remotely justifies it.  This too proved to be one of the areas that stakeholders complained about and ultimately, it seems that Nardelli got tired of fighting about it too.