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.

The first thing you ought to do if you’re the new person in charge is nothing,” says Schacht. “I have learned this over and over again. Resist the temptation to ‘hit the ground running.’ It is absolutely almost certain to be wrong.” He stresses this is even true in a crisis situation.

Schacht’s advice is especially pertinent during a crisis. In troubled times you need to have as many brains as possible working on the issues, but those brains have to agree on what they are doing and why. “You have to have agreement on definition of duties,” he says. “You’ve got to have roles and responsibilities and none of that is easily apparent, particularly in a crisis and particularly when you have to make changes.” Listening and talking to people takes time, a precious commodity when everyone is breathing down your neck and demanding answers, direction, and a strategy for salvation. Nonetheless, Schacht declares, “This is not a luxury, it’s critically important. It’s the most important thing you can do.

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.

Lucent’s Schacht offers sound advice for the new CEO in a crisis:

“If I were a new CEO coming into a new company at a tough time. I’d have a deal with the board. I would tell them, ‘I’m going to keep you informed every step of the way. But you’re not my most important problem right now. You’re asked me to come in and you’ve given me a good briefing and I thank you; now please give me a little room. I’ll be back with a status report in two or three weeks, and if something else comes up, we’ll be on the phone together. But right now my most important constituent is the internal folks and our customers.