How I Built This

It takes an immense amount of emotional maturity, no matter how old you are, to recognize that the business you are leading is bigger and more important than the idea (your idea!) on which that business was originally built. It takes humility to accept that the idea itself maybe isn’t what you thought it was, or that it has evolved gradually, then

This is by far the most interesting aspect—and, I think, one of the most important characteristics—of so many of the pivot stories that I have heard from founders directly or that have become business school and Silicon Valley lore. Rarely, it seems, do companies pivot from failure to success. They don’t go from a bad idea to a good idea. Rather, t

That seems to be the recipe for every successful pivot—not just the recognition that you can’t keep doing what you’re doing if you want to grow or survive, but also identifying something else to do and/or some other place to do it.

In an effort to make standing in those long lines more bearable, Stacy started cutting up their leftover pitas at the end of each day and then baking the pieces into different-flavored chips (cinnamon sugar and parmesan garlic to start) that she would hand out for free to customers while they waited for their sandwiches. “Initially, it was just a w

Ernest Hemingway put these words casually into the mouth of Mike Campbell, one of his secondary characters in The Sun Also Rises, when he was asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

it is unmistakably clear that when catastrophe strikes a business—whether it’s a storied multinational conglomerate that has been around 100 years or a scrappy upstart just getting its footing at the national level—the only reliable way through that critical “before and after” moment that Jeni Britton Bauer described is through quick, decisive, tra

it took another six months for Ford and Firestone to agree to a mass recall of what remained of the nearly 14.5 million affected tires that were still out on the road. It took that long because leaders within both companies were spending most of that time arguing over whose fault those accidents were, and therefore who was liable for the pain and s

Whereas Burke introduced triple-seal tamper-proof packaging to all Tylenol products, Jeni published an open letter on the company blog at the end of August 2015. The letter outlined every single thing that had happened; described their ice cream–making process so consumers knew how the whole thing worked; announced the hiring of a new quality contr

James Burke had to build trust with consumers on the fly, in real time, as he managed the Tylenol poisoning crisis. Jeni Britton Bauer had smartly baked trust into her brand, which soon gave her the confidence that, as long as she made good decisions, things would never get as bad as they otherwise could.