These guys were Tom Murphy and Dan Burke. Over the years, they’d built Cap Cities, starting a small television station in Albany, New York, acquisition by acquisition. With help from Tom’s close friend Warren Buffett, who backed the $3.5 billion deal, they were able to swallow our much larger company. (As Tom Murphy put it, they were “the minnow that ate the whale.”)

He’s been successful in the job beyond all of my hopes. (Of the nearly two dozen Disney films that have earned more than $1 billion at the box office, almost three-quarters of them were released under Alan.) And he’s a decent, kind, forthright, collaborative partner to everyone he works with. Which is another lesson to be taken from his hiring: Surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do. You can’t always predict who will have ethical lapses or reveal a side of themselves you never suspected was there. In the worst cases, you will have to deal with acts that reflect badly on the company and demand censure. That’s an unavoidable part of the job, but you have to demand honesty and integrity from everyone, and when there’s a lapse you have to deal with it immediately.

These are all executives who have been trained for years to grow their own businesses and are compensated based on their profitability. Suddenly I was saying to them, essentially, “I want you to pay less attention to the business at which you’ve been very successful, and start paying more attention to this other thing. And by the way, you have to work on this new thing along with these other very competitive people from other teams, whose interests don’t necessarily line up with yours. And one more thing, it won’t make money for a while.

What Pressler did instead was formulate an agenda for his first hundred days as CEO. the backbone would be one-on-one meetings with Gap Inc.’s fifty top executives, as which he would ask each executive the same five questions:

• What about Gap Inc. do you want to preserve and why?

• What do you hope I do?

• What are you concerned I might do?

• What are you concerned I might not do?

• What is your most important tool for figuring out what the consumer wants?

“Similarly, when Terry Semel became chairman and CEO of Internet bellwether Yahoo! in May 2001, he had a twenty-one-year track record building Warner Bros. from an $850 million single-revenue-stream company operating in one country into an $11.5 billion diversified entertainment and consumer products powerhouse with operations in fifty-five countries.

After World War II, the United States commissioned David Lilienthal to head the new Atomic Energy Commission. Lilienthal brought together a group of people who were highly influential—celebrities in their own right—disciples, as it were, of their own frames of reference. This very diverse group of individuals had an extremely heavy agenda, and they were impatient to get at it. In addition, the press was pushing them.