A second example of a great idea comes from Mary Lou Shockley, now chief financial officer of the Spectrum Services division of Pacific Telesis. She relates that she had presented to her company, at that time Pacific Telephone, an analysis of their poor performance in the timely installation of data services. She was flying back to Los Angeles with her boss, Doug Fagg, having an end-of-the-day drink, when:

It dawned on me that the responsibility for the installation of the service was in the hands of only fifteen people in a department of sixteen hundred. Why not set up a club that would meet every two weeks over lunch to discuss the roadblocks to service intervention?

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.

A frenetic approach just makes the company even more unstable. One, you’re not likely to be right. Two, even if you are right, nobody knows what the heck you’re doing. Three, you haven’t bothered to listen to anybody, so you have strained relationships you want to cement. Now, if you’re going to run out of money in five or six days, you’ve got a bit of a different story than if you’re going to run out of money in ninety days. That’s what I call the ‘burning platform’ problem. If you’ve got a burning platform problem, you don’t have a lot of time, so you have to take things in two steps. You have to gather your team together and say, ‘Guys, before we do anything else, we had better put this fire out. Then we’ll take a deep breath.’” - Henry Schacht.

Financial legacies are the most damaging, warns Jeff Killeen. “Don’t get trapped into adopting someone else’s budget,” he says, “even if the board puts pressure on you to lock down a plan. You need several months to assess assumptions, and budgets are products of assumptions, thoughtfully drafted. You need time to think about the right metrics and business drivers, and then you need time to think about the talent and resources necessary to pull it all off. By letting yourself compromise on this point,” he concludes, “you give up a slide of your credibility. God forbid you adopt someone else’s plan, knowing you want to revisit their assumptions. Six months later when you do that and you have to reforecast, the board won’t remember that that’s what you said you were going to do.

TWENTY: The Most Important Stock on Earth

“Management professors theorized that a chief executive should ideally have between eight and twelve direct reports. Huang now had fifty-five. He had no right-hand man or woman, no majordomo, no second-in-command. Huang also had no designated successor, and as Nvidia grew, its C-suite actually shrank, meaning that there was no scapegoat for mistakes. Board members spoke of his irreplaceability; it was not an exaggeration to suggest that Huang had personally saved the American economy from recession. The US stock market, over the course of Nvidia’s rise, had pulled away from markets in Europe and Asia.