Brian J. Dunn

Title: Chief Executive Officer

Brian Dunn is chief executive officer of Best Buy Co., Inc., an innovative growth company with a portfolio of retail and service brands that empowers its employees to provide customers around the world with superior experiences by responding to their unique needs and aspirations. Dunn became Best Buy’s CEO on June 24, 2009.

Dunn started with Best Buy in 1985 as a sales associate when the company operated just a dozen stores. In the more than twenty years since, his career has been a reflection of the company itself – confident, optimistic and unafraid to grow and take on new challenges.

In 1989 he became a store manager and in 1990 a district manager in Minnesota. He was promoted to regional manager for Ohio, Indianapolis and Philadelphia stores in 1996, and in May, 1998 he became regional vice president of the northeastern region, leading Best Buy’s entry into that market. He was promoted to senior vice president of division 3 retail sales in March 2000, which encompassed all of Best Buy’s East Coast operations. He was named executive vice president of U.S. retail in 2002, and president of retail, North America, in December 2004. He was named president and chief operating officer of the Best Buy enterprise in January 2006.

At every stop along the way, Dunn has demonstrated a rare ability to connect with people and inspire them to work together to accomplish extraordinary things. Dunn is a product of – and a steward of – a unique Best Buy field culture that has driven and continues to drive the company’s performance. He firmly believes that in order to be truly great, Best Buy must be fused together at its core by people with a set of shared, unshakeable values.

As Best Buy has grown, Dunn has used his own influence to ensure that the company continues to treat these values as precious: to have fun while being the best; to show respect, humility and integrity; to learn from challenge and change; and to unleash the power of people.

Dunn has also encouraged the company to fight against the slide to generic bureaucracy that often accompanies aggressive growth, and has championed an informal – often irreverent – internal culture. The successful preservation of these attributes has helped breed a fierce company loyalty among long-time Best Buy employees, and fostered an organizational ability to quickly and positively adapt to constant change.

Dunn began his retail education as a teenager when he took a full-time job at a local grocery store. After graduating from high school, Dunn continued to focus on the retail industry and started working at Best Buy. An astute student of human behavior and voracious reader of business literature, Dunn’s non-traditional education has provided him with rich, real world experiences, a strong network of mentors, including Best Buy founder Dick Schulze, and a leadership style that is respected by employees and the financial community alike.

Dunn’s multi-level career has equipped him with a special contextual understanding of how a company lives and breathes. In June 2006, Dunn was elected to bring this unique perspective to Dick’s Sporting Goods as a member of the company’s board of directors.