The Big Score

On January 15, P&G's selection group arrived at HP's headquarters. Talbott and his team worked to convince P&G that HP could handle the "speeds and feeds" -- P&G's near-bottomless technical needs. The day culminated with a dinner at Chantilly, a Menlo Park restaurant, where they were to be joined by Ann Livermore, HP's head of global services. As Livermore drove into the restaurant's parking lot, she got a call on her cell phone. It was Talbott. "He said the meetings were going very well," she recalls. "What he really meant was, 'Don't blow it.' "

Livermore walked into a private dining room, and before she could grab a glass of wine, the P&G team strafed her with questions: Why should HP get this contract? Do you understand the significance of this undertaking? Can we rely on you when problems crop up? "They were looking for consistency," she says. "Were we consistent in our values, our beliefs, and our practices, from the front lines right on up to the executive level?" After a half-hour, someone from HP suggested that they sit down for dinner, where the questions could continue.

Then came the kicker. The door opened, and in walked Fiorina, who had slipped away from a Cisco board dinner in another part of the restaurant. Her appearance was completely unexpected -- even on the HP side -- and she spent about 20 minutes speaking with the P&G team. "I wanted them to understand, from the top, how important this opportunity was to us," she recalls. "At HP, we spend a lot of time thinking about who we do business with. P&G needed to know that we wouldn't be pursuing this if we didn't think we could add value -- and if we didn't think we could win."

It was an extraordinary session, with extraordinary stakes. If HP didn't make the cut, the market, in effect, would be sending the message that despite the Compaq acquisition, HP services still wasn't ready for prime time. "We were competing for our future," says Mary Rolf, who manages HP's relationship with P&G. "It would have been a tremendous setback if we hadn't gotten a slot in that final bidding process."

She needn't have worried. Two weeks later, P&G made it official when it chose IBM, EDS, and HP as the three companies that made the finals. Overjoyed, Talbott christened the HP pursuit team with a new name: Project Chantilly.

Making the Pig Fly

On January 31, Talbott received a FedEx containing two 750 MB CDs: Procter & Gamble's RFP (request for proposals), which laid out the bidding process. He slipped the first disc into his PC and clicked on the timeline. His jaw dropped: Bids were due at P&G headquarters on March 28. A billion-dollar IT-outsourcing contract typically takes at least 9 to 12 months to bid out. P&G's do-or-die deadline allowed for just 56 days. Then he hit the print button, and got his second shock. Over the next hour, the two CDs chewed up two cases of paper. The RFP totaled more than 10,000 pages. "I was awestruck," he recalls. "The thing was massive, and there just wasn't the time to take it all in."

Two days later, on a Sunday afternoon, Talbott punched in John Crowther's cell-phone number, and found him with his wife and two daughters at a mall near their home in the Detroit suburbs. Crowther, a native of the UK, had put in 19 years at HP managed services and knew the division intimately. "Get on tomorrow's first flight to Cincinnati," Talbott told him. "You're going to be my bid manager."

Crowther set up a make-shift campaign headquarters in a scruffy HP facility in Blue Ash, Ohio, not far from P&G's U.S.-based global-data center. He spent the next two weeks recruiting help from all over the globe, a team that quickly grew to 80 people. At their first full-scale meeting, Jim Fischer, the lead technical architect, walked in with a stuffed toy -- a pink flying pig -- and tied it to the conference room ceiling. His message: "We might be the underdog, but we're going to make pigs fly on this deal."

Then Talbott stood up to speak. "We wouldn't have been selected if P&G wasn't comfortable with the notion that we could win, and the same holds true for EDS and IBM -- we're all starting at the same place," he told the team leaders. "The ultimate decision comes down to how we interact with the customer. In each of our meetings with P&G, there will be one of two possible outcomes: We move closer to the win column or we move closer to the lose column. Our job is to ensure that every conversation is a win."

Over at P&G's headquarters, the selection team and its advisers, the Houston-based IT-outsourcing consultancy TPI, began handicapping the three contenders. IBM was ultrafocused and played up its deep technical and outsourcing experience. Its learning curve was very short -- from day one, it understood 80% of P&G's systems and processes. On the downside, IBM proved to be less flexible than EDS and HP. "IBM treated us like a big, important customer, but they were somewhat paternalistic," says Reedy. "Their attitude was, 'Trust us, we know what we're doing.' " (Executives at IBM declined to comment on the record for this story.)