New Leaders, New Agenda

Who: Gary Kusin

Title: CEO, Kinko's Inc.
Home Base: Dallas, Texas

As an entrepreneur myself, I knew that the best thing to do was to go straight to the front lines to learn what makes this place tick. During my first six months, I went into every single one of our 24 markets in the United States, visited more than 200 stores, and met with more than 2,500 team members. I knew that our team members could tell me what the company needed to do in order to keep evolving.

The most important thing I heard was that our customers have changed. We used to be viewed as a simple corner copy shop. What became clear to me as I talked with people in our stores was that customers are now looking more for ongoing business partners. They don't just need a quick turnaround copy job in the middle of the night. They want to know that they can partner with us to get digital solutions for bigger jobs. Right now, the biggest service we can sell is confidence: the ability to listen to our customers, to understand their problems, and to apply our knowledge to come up with creative solutions.

When you hit a recession as we did in my first few months here, you need to do a lot of different things all at once. I focused on listening to and learning from our team members -- that's what leadership is all about. But I also had to focus on doing things to preserve our top and bottom lines. What this has shown me is that as far as running a tight operation is concerned, it's always good to play very defensively. When things are good, people become lax. So we've taken this opportunity to get buttoned down. Then, even if the economy lifts -- recession or no recession -- we will not lose that focus.

Gary Kusin joined global document-solutions giant Kinko's as CEO in August 2001. A self-described serial entrepreneur, Kusin cofounded the successful consumer-software company Babbage's Inc., which went public in 1988 then merged with a competitor in 1994 to become NeoStar Retail Group. Kusin then cofounded Laura Mercier Cosmetics, a high-end makeup line, which he sold to Neiman Marcus in 1998. Following the sale of Laura Mercier, and until being named the new CEO of Kinko's, Kusin served as CEO of executive office-suites corporation HQ Global Workplaces.

Who: Susan Lyne

Title: President, ABC Entertainment
Home Base: New York and Los Angeles

Whenever someone comes into a new position of management, there is an opportunity to break old habits. As president of ABC Entertainment, my top priority is getting the younger creative people at the network to feel comfortable speaking up. In general, the TV industry is very quick to blame and very slow to celebrate the work and the people behind it.

In the past, the impulse here has been to pick up pilots that management loved -- things that were just plain well written. But as I've reviewed our lineup, I've realized that we can't be that diffuse anymore. We need to find the gaps in our schedule, identify categories of viewers that we're missing, and force everyone to address those needs as we read the material coming in.

ABC has a great tradition and a great history. We do have a real challenge ahead of us right now: We haven't launched a big new franchise since The Practice, and that was six years ago. This is still a young network -- we're only 50 years old. It wasn't so long ago that this was a startup company, built extremely well and based on a few basic tenets: Bring great family programming to masses of Americans but occasionally take risks in both subject matter and program formatting.

It's important to remind everybody of our great tradition while also sending the message that having a little bit of startup mentality will make us all work harder and be more excited about the task at hand.

Susan Lyne took the reins at ABC Entertainment in January 2002. Prior to accepting the position, she was responsible for ABC's TV movies and miniseries division, where she managed the network's relationship with Oprah Winfrey's company, Harpo Films, and helped develop the Oprah Winfrey Presents television movies for the network. Lyne also helped launch the movie magazine Premiere and served as its editor in chief for almost nine years. She has also been the managing editor for New Times and the Village Voice.