These reviews focused on very basic, very fundamental questions with the intent of helping the team make better strategic choices. The group would spend three or four hours chewing on the few critical issues together. We had three reasons for the shift in process.

First, we wanted to shift the culture of the organization to one that was more dialogue oriented. Second, we wanted to create a structure in which the business teams could truly benefit from the experience and cross-enterprise perspective of senior leaders. And finally, we wanted to build the strategic-thinking capabilities of P&G’s executives, asking them to practice thinking through strategic issues with others in real time. P&G executives are great operators in the businesses and the functions. The company needed its leaders to become better strategists because better, more choiceful strategies would enable yet better operations. P&G needed multidimensional leaders who could both make tough strategic calls and lead effective operating teams.

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.

At the same time, Kusin turned to George Tamke, the interim CEO who had led the search for Kusin and became nonexecutive chairman when Kusin came on board. Even though Kusin brought in Connors as an outside confidant, Tamke quickly turned into an inside one.

“Every single Friday night or Saturday morning - and I don’t believe I missed a week until we sold the company - I sent George a three- to six-page, single-spaced update of what I was doing, what I was thinking about, what had been going on in the company. We then spent one to two hours late Saturday afternoon going over it. He thought about what I said, and he offered his advice…

At GE, Immelt relies on the board to take the pulse of the company, to gauge whether the business is humming along smoothly or there are glitches that need attention. “I asked each of our directors to visit the GE businesses twice a year,” he says. “You’re never going to know the intricacies of this company. There’s too much mass. But you can get a feel of the culture. So when they go to GE Aircraft Engines or GE Medical Systems, I want them by themselves [without corporate management], so they can make their own assessments - maybe we’re pushing too hard or maybe we’re not pushing hard enough.”

At The Home Depot, all directors were required to visit eighteen stores every year and spend two hours on each visit speaking with employees and customers. When he became CEO in 2000, Bob Nardelli continued that tradition and enhanced it: “I pair two board members with every division president and every functional leader for a full day. I look for their advice and counsel. These are CEOs and experienced men and women in their own right. I took advantage of their experience. Rather than being intimidated by it, I reached out and said, 'You go in and assess, give me your view of the individuals and their staffs.’ So the board is helpful.

Or, as Bill liked to say: “If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader. They acclaim that, not you.” He attributed this mantra to Donna Dubinsky and usually included the not-so-flattering story behind it. Donna worked with Bill at Apple and Claris, the software company that was spun out of Apple. Bill had been a big shot at Apple, VP of sales and marketing, and had been very successful at Kodak. In both companies he had been detail oriented, frequently micromanaging his team members. That worked pretty well, so when he took on the CEO role at Claris, he figured it was his job to tell everyone what to do. Which he did. Late one afternoon Donna dropped by Bill’s office and told him that if he was going to tell everyone what to do, they were all going to quit and go back to Apple. No one wanted to work for a dictator. She added a bit more wisdom for the first-time CEO: “Bill, your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader.