The experience was liberating for Huang. Desperation, not inspiration, was the mother of victory. Huang encouraged his employees to preserve the mindset they’d adopted during the Riva crunch, asking them to constantly behave as if the company was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy even when it was making massive profits. For years to come, Jensen opened staff presentations with the words “Our company is thirty days from going out of business.” Even today at Nvidia, this sentence remains the corporate mantra.

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The Life Cycle of a CEO— Claudius A. Hildebrand & Robert J. Stark

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Introduction

In fact, Dave hadn’t been the first choice for the CEO position, or even the second or third choice. Word was five others had been offered the job before him. What’s more, a couple of years earlier he’d been unceremoniously fired from his position as divisional president at a leading competitor. No one would have suggested from his educational background, either, that he was CEO material. Not only did he not have a degree from an elite school, but it also took him six years to graduate. He hated college and he’d dropped out for a time.

As Dave’s first year in the CEO seat progressed, the sneering assessments of that Florida night prevailed on the Street; the company’s stock slid 40 percent.

Terry Lundgren ran into stiff resistance while executing his strategic plan in the years of his Reinvention stage. As noted earlier, he was appointed CEO of Federated Department Stores in 2003 with the express mandate to make bold moves to expand the business. After just three months at the helm, Lundgren faced a golden opportunity: purchasing the legendary Marshall Field’s chain. The acquisition would take the company a grand leap forward, and he would become the steward of another of the nation’s most beloved retail brands.

But then, in January 2005, a mere eight months after May bought Field’s, the May CEO resigned; Khan was under fire for vastly overpaying to cinch the deal. Lundgren immediately seized the opportunity to buy all of May— much bigger game purchased for a fabulous price. “After selling assets that were part of the bigger $11 billion deal, we ended with a net purchase price of $3 billion,” he recounted, “which is $200 million less than what May paid for Marshall Field’s. I got Marshall Field’s plus all of the May Company assets that we wanted in order to expand our brand.

1. John Antioco, “How I Did It: Blockbuster’s Former CEO on Sparring with an Activist Shareholder,” Harvard Business Review, April 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/04/how-i-did-it-blockbusters-former-ceo-on-sparring-with-an-activist-shareholder.