Mindset by Carol Dweck

Author:Carol Dweck
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781588365231
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Anne: Learning, Toughness, and Compassion

Take IBM. Plunge it into debt to the tune of seventeen billion. Destroy its credit rating. Make it the target of SEC investigations. And drop its stock from $63.69 to $4.43 a share. What do you get? Xerox.

That was the Xerox Anne Mulcahy took over in 2000. Not only had the company failed to diversify, it could no longer even sell its copy machines. But three years later, Xerox had had four straight profitable quarters, and in 2004 Fortune named Mulcahy “the hottest turnaround act since Lou Gerstner.” How did she do it?

She went into an incredible learning mode, making herself into the CEO Xerox needed to survive. She and her top people, like Ursula Burns, learned the nitty-gritty of every part of the business. For example, as Fortune writer Betsy Morris explains, Mulcahy took Balance Sheet 101. She learned about debt, inventory, taxes, and currency so she could predict how each decision she made would play out on the balance sheet. Every weekend, she took home large binders and pored over them as though her final exam was on Monday. When she took the helm, people at Xerox units couldn’t give her simple answers about what they had, what they sold, or who was in charge. She became a CEO who knew those answers or knew where to get them.

She was tough. She told everyone the cold, hard truth they didn’t want to know—like how the Xerox business model was not viable or how close the company was to running out of money. She cut the employee rolls by 30 percent. But she was no Chainsaw Al. Instead, she bore the emotional brunt of her decisions, roaming the halls, hanging out with the employees, and saying “I’m sorry.” She was tough but compassionate. In fact, she’d wake up in the middle of the night worrying about what would happen to the remaining employees and retirees if the company folded.

She worried constantly about the morale and development of her people, so that even with the cuts, she refused to sacrifice the unique and wonderful parts of the Xerox culture. Xerox was known throughout the industry as the company that gave retirement parties and hosted retiree reunions. As the employees struggled side by side with her, she refused to abolish their raises and, in a morale-boosting gesture, gave them all their birthdays off. She wanted to save the company in body and spirit. And not for herself or her ego, but for all her people who were stretching themselves to the limit for the company.

After slaving away for two years, Mulcahy opened Time magazine only to see a picture of herself grouped with the notorious heads of Tyco and WorldCom, men responsible for two of the biggest corporate management disasters of our time.

But a year later she knew her hard work was finally paying off when one of her board members, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble, told her, “I never thought I would be proud to have my name associated with this company again.

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