I then proposed that, based on my reading, we had five ninety-day priorities:

• Stop hemorrhaging cash. We were precariously close to running out of money.

• Make sure we would be profitable in 1994 to send a message to the world—and to the IBM workforce—that we had stabilized the company.

• Develop and implement a key customer strategy for 1993 and 1994—one that would convince customers that we were back serving their interests, not just pushing “iron” (mainframes) down their throats to ease our short-term financial pressures.

• Finish right-sizing by the beginning of the third quarter.

• Develop an intermediate-term business strategy.

Finally, I laid out an assignment for the next thirty days. I asked for a ten-page report from each business unit leader covering customer needs, product line, competitive analysis, technical outlook, economics, both long- and short-term key issues, and the 1993-94 outlook.

I also asked all attendees to describe for me their view of IBM in total: What short-term steps could we take to get aggressive on customer relationships, sales, and competitive attacks?

What should we be thinking about in our long-term and short-term business strategies?

Pressler’s process was as important to this as the specific expectations he set. He conducted one-on-one interviews with the company's top fifty managers, asking each of them the same six carefully considered questions to get their insights about the business, to solicit their advice, and to see what themes emerged. He and the Gap Inc. communications department also created a weblog for all the company’s employees, posting all of his activities and what he was learning. As a result, “people saw that I was genuinely engaged and was willing to listen before I talked about where we needed to go or communicated a vision or approach,” Pressler says. “And that put people at ease. More important, people felt very connected to the learning experience I went through, and all those folks in the field who felt underappreciated began to feel that they were significant. I wasn’t making promises or changes as much as being a listening post.

Pressler recognized that it would be premature in the first hundred days to develop a comprehensive strategic plan - and even if he did, it might be wrong. But he knew that in an organization of 165,000 employees, he needed to find a way to set a direction and motivate the people.

As with his management team and employees, Pressler set the stage for working well with the company’s board of directors by being straightforward, communicative, and organized and by listening well. Gap Inc. had had only two CEOs in its entire history. As a first-time CEO, Pressler did not pretend to be an expert in working with a board, and his disarming candor about being a neophyte was exactly the right approach. The board was thrilled at the prospect of starting a partnership based on mutual openness and respect. “Later on, when I started to present strategy to them, they were very dynamic and engaged,” Pressler says.

Henry Schacht also knows the important of putting on a game face in a crisis. When the former CEO and chairman of Lucent returned in October 2000 after the forced departure of CEO Richard McGinn, the technology bust had vaporized many of its customers and slashed the spending budgets of the one that remained. The financial analysts that Schacht had completed showed that Lucent could well run out of money in ninety days. Schacht’s crisis communication plan and the way he communicated with his largest customers helped save the company.