Fast Talk: Time for a Turnaround

Lisa Harper

Chairman and CEO
The Gymboree Corp.
Burlingame, California

I was the reluctant CEO, the naive CEO. I took the helm after Gymboree had taken a long walk through a dark forest. There had been broad pressure to grow the business and reinvigorate the brand -- but with no consideration for what the brand stood for. That had to change. I was passionate about the people, the product, and the customer, and I wanted to bring the business back to life. I didn't get lost or paralyzed by the high-stakes enormity of turning this around. Instead, I thought about fixing the product and reenergizing the team.

Step one, then: Fix the product. Our customers couldn't stop telling us how stupid we were for getting rid of our unique, colorful mix-and-match designs and replacing them with trendy, adultlike clothes for kids. We had to innovate through the customer's eyes. If you want to turn a company around, you can't turn your back on the customer.

In those first 18 months, we also paid close attention to our people, especially the ones in the stores. They heard from angry customers all day, every day. One thing we do now is get feedback on every line from the stores and then respond to it. We say, "Here's why we're using that suggestion" -- or not. The idea is that we always close the loop on communication.

Lisa Harper (lharper@gymboree.com) rejoined Gymboree as senior vice president of design in 1999 and was promoted several times before assuming the role of CEO last February. Gymboree recently launched Janie and Jack, a retail concept that offers newborn apparel and accessories.

Richard Syron

Chairman and CEO
Thermo Electron Corp.
Waltham, Massachusetts

Never understate the value of two key factors: clarity and luck. Back in 1999, Thermo Electron was on the road to trouble. We were just too complex. It wasn't that the company was suffering because of our products. Our products were suffering because of how we were set up. If you put a hundred customers in a room, you'd hear a hundred ideas about our core capabilities. So we sold or spun off units with more than $2 billion worth of sales.

Naturally, people were skeptical. So we pushed for operational clarity too. We created a matrix -- our various businesses on the vertical axis, action items on the horizontal -- and put it on the Web. I told employees, customers, and shareholders to review that matrix regularly. If most of the boxes weren't checked after one year, then they would be and should be talking to a new CEO.

Of course, we began the reinvention process when the market was healthy. I don't know if we could do in this economy what we started a few years ago. That's where the luck comes in.

Richard Syron led Thermo Electron's transformation from a holding company with 24 public companies to one operating company focused on technology-based instruments. Prior to joining Thermo, he was chairman and CEO of the American Stock Exchange.

Carolynn Reid-Wallace

President
Fisk University
Nashville, Tennessee

Fisk University used to mean something. It is one of the oldest historically black universities and a citadel of higher education. I'm a member of the class of 1964, and I watched the school fall on hard times during the 1980s and struggle to turn things around. It's still struggling. Today, we're at the very beginning of a major transformation. I'm trying to reinvent a historically black institution into a truly American institution. Fisk is no good to anyone as a shrine to its past glory. We must open our doors to a large number of students who aren't black.

The fact that I'm the first female president has made a tough job tougher. A man who walks into a turnaround gets a year to prove himself. A woman gets 60 days. So I made my agenda clear to every constituent group. In fact, I made it clear to the board of trustees before they hired me. I said, "Here's my program. Take it or leave it." That way, I could match words with action from the outset.

And I did. During my first 60 days, I recruited eight new members of my staff. Finally, I began a revitalization of the campus. Art that used to be in vaults now hangs on walls. Beauty lifts morale.

Carolynn Reid-Wallace (crwallace@fisk.edu) became Fisk's 13th president in 2001 and the first woman to hold the position in the school's 136-year history.