Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise through Dramatic Change Read Online Free Page A

strategies. Yet, the company was frozen in place. What it needed was someone to grab hold of it and shake it back into action. The point Murphy came back to again and again was that the challenge for the next leader would begin with driving the kind of strategic and cultural change that had characterized a lot of what I’d done at American Express and RJR.
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    At the end of that long afternoon, I was prepared to make the most important career decision of my life. I said yes. In retrospect, it’s almost hard for me to remember why. I suppose it was some of Jim Burke’s patriotism and some of Tom Murphy’s arguments playing to my gluttony for world-class challenges. At any rate, we shook hands and agreed to work out a financial package and announcement.
    In hindsight, it’s interesting that both Burke and Murphy were operating under the assumption provided by the management of IBM that a strategy of breaking up the company into independent units was the right one to pursue. What would they have said if they realized that not only was the company in financial trouble and had lost touch with its customers, but that it was also barreling toward a strategy of disaster?
    I drove home that afternoon and told my family of my decision.
    As usual in my wonderful family, I got a mixed reaction. One of my children said, “Yes, go for it, Dad!” The other, more conservative child thought I had lost my mind. My wife, who had been quite wary of the idea originally, supported my decision and was excited about it.
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    The Announcement
    O ver the next ten days we worked out an employment contract. Doing so was not easy, for several reasons. The big one was the fact that RJR Nabisco was an LBO, and in an LBO the CEO is expected to align himself or herself with the owners and have a large equity position in his or her company. Consequently, at RJR
    Nabisco I owned 2.4 million shares and had options for 2.6 million more. In IBM, stock ownership was a de minimus part of executive compensation. The IBM board and human resources (HR) bureaucracy apparently did not share the view that managers should have a significant stake in the company. This was my first taste of the extraordinary insularity of IBM.
    Somehow we worked everything out, and my next task was to tell KKR and the RJR board of my decision. That weekend, March 20-21, was the annual Nabisco Dinah Shore Golf Tournament. Nabisco invited all of its major customers to the event, and it was important for me to attend. I also knew that Henry Kravis, one of KKR’s senior partners, would be there, and I decided that I would discuss my decision with him then. My name had already surfaced in the media as a candidate for the IBM job, and I knew that KKR and the RJR board were nervous. In meetings with KKR over the preceding weeks, there WHO SAYS ELEPHANTS CAN’T DANCE? / 19
    was a noticeable tension in the air. So, on Sunday, March 21, in my hotel room at the Dinah Shore tournament, I told Henry Kravis I was going to accept the IBM job. He was not happy, but true to form, he was polite and calm. He tried to talk me out of my decision, but I was firm that there was no going back. While we never discussed it, what was implicit in that conversation was the knowledge we shared that both of us were working on our exits from RJR. I just happened to finish sooner. (KKR started its exit a year later.) The next day, Monday, I returned from California for the beginning of a very eventful week. The IBM board was meeting a week later. It became obvious that the search committee had begun to shut down its operations—because, one by one, the other rumored candidates for the IBM job started to announce or to leak to the media that they were not interested in the job. On Wednesday The Wall Street Journal reported that I was the only candidate; the next day, so did every other major business publication. It was time to get this whole ordeal over with. Burke and I agreed