for societal, environmental, and governance practices with little to no patience for inaction. Growing and protecting brand value, whether it's for consumers or business-to-business, is contingent on organizations navigating uncharted waters of social change in hyperpolarized communities. And every one of us is making choices about what to buy from whom, driven not only by product or service quality, but by whose values align with our own and speak to a shared purpose.
The year 2020 was a moment of truth for character. And I'm proud of how the employees at Anaplan—the company I lead—persevered. Our ongoing emotional investment in living our values enabled shared resilience. Resilience that fueled our leaders and teams through the worst of circumstances. What we drew on was an upstanding character that we knowingly—and sometimes unknowingly—created to guide us with clarity and cohesion.
While the multiple crises of 2020 underscored the renewed and urgent relevance of company character, the cumulative factors, previously outlined, which affect all businesses and have led to this moment. To help navigate our shared experience, I wrote this book drawing on the artifacts and experiences I've cultivated as a leader. I've assembled wisdom from experts and peers in my network, included notable stories from business headlines, and shared methods to develop your own versions of upstanding character for your organizations. As a result, this book offers ways to think about company character, culture, and actions you and your teams can take to lead effectively now.
I definitely don't have all the answers, and I don't get it right all the time. But I am willing to keep trying. It's imperative we all do.
How I Got Here
I'll never forget my first real job. I was 20 years old during the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Fordham University, where I was working on a degree in accounting and finance. I applied to IBM for a position as a summer intern, went through a pretty rigorous round of interviews, and was accepted. Little did I know at the time what an impact this temporary summer job would have on my future. And never could I even imagine it shaping my views as a future CEO.
Getting hired by IBM, even for just a few months, was a really big deal for me and my family. At the time, IBM was still the 800-pound gorilla of the computer industry, and the company was well known as one of the most successful corporations in American business. In 1979, the company was ranked No. 7 on the Fortune 500 with annual revenues of more than $21 billion and profits of more than $3 billion. By way of comparison, then No. 1 General Motors had three times more annual revenue—$63.2 billion—but “just” $3.5 billion in profit.1
I repeated my internship with IBM the following summer, and when I graduated, I accepted a full-time position with the company. I ended up working at IBM for 21 years, building a career that helped me get established at Cisco Systems and set the stage for my future growth as a leader. And while I have worked for—and led—some amazing companies in the years since, IBM and Cisco both made a tremendous impression on me, and I have carried a piece of each with me.
Let me start with IBM. The overarching mantra at IBM when I was there was a deep and abiding respect for the individual and the community. And not just for those who were employed by IBM, but respect for individuals who were part of our business ecosystem—partners, vendors, and customers—and respect for the people who lived and worked in the communities in which we did business. As new employees, we were taught about the history of this great company, and we were steeped in its values and culture. In fact, there was a company song we knew called “Ever Onward,” the official IBM rally song.
IBM's culture was built on a firm foundation of what it called the Basic Beliefs, introduced by then-CEO Thomas J. Watson Jr. in 1962:
Respect for the individual;
The best customer service in the world; and
Excellence.2
I quickly came to appreciate this remarkably deep, people-focused culture. I learned at IBM how pivotal a clear, pervasive culture is to the success of any business—no matter what industry it's in, where it's located, or how large or small it might be—and how hard it is to sustain performance when times get tough in the absence of strong shared core values.
My experience at IBM also taught me what can happen when leaders fail to honor, promote, and renew a company's culture. IBM faced a very real crisis of confidence in the 1980s as the computer market shifted from the large mainframes that provided most of the company's revenues and profits to small desktops. In 1986, earnings declined 27 percent and revenues dropped precipitously. During the course of six years, 170,000 employees were laid off or retired, budgets were cut, business lines were discontinued, and the pension program was slashed.3 As IBM's business results became more challenged, new people were brought in to run the operation, and they didn't take advantage of the culture as an asset to drive and accelerate a required reformulation of IBM's business strategy. Instead, the business changed the culture, and this negatively affected the business.
Of course, IBM wasn't alone during this time—many other stalwarts of American business conducted layoffs, cut benefits, and restructured their operations. According to The Economist, in the decade after 1987, approximately 3.5 million American workers lost their jobs due to downsizing.4 The focus of many companies moved from people to the bottom line, and the focus remained there for the better part of two decades as the dominant mindset of corporations.
Make no mistake about it—growing sales and profits was always an important part of the IBM mindset, but historically, this growth was considered to be a natural result of following the three Basic Beliefs. If you respect employees, provide the best customer service, and demand excellence, IBM would grow—and grow and grow.
At IBM, I started out in finance, and I was fortunate to be invited to join a special management development program for individuals with strong leadership potential. A key part of the course was a talent assessment to determine early in our careers if we had the attributes that would be required to lead IBM into the future. As you can imagine, the pressure to excel in the assessment was intense. We were tasked with working through complex business cases—problem solving, developing strategies, working as part of a team, presenting, and writing. Through it all, seven or eight assessors closely watched everything we did that week; how we managed ourselves determined our career progression. As an introvert, it was a hugely stressful pressure-cooker experience that pushed me to be more extroverted. While it felt way outside my usual comfort zone, it also thoroughly engaged my competitive instinct—I could win at this!—and it was formative to shaping my leadership drive.
The course and assessment were rigorous, but they were also helpful and revealing. When we received our results, we learned exactly what we did well, what areas we should work on to improve, and we had a much better idea of our potential as future leaders at IBM. Excellence was expected and the bar was set high. I eventually worked my way up to Vice President, Finance and Operations for Global Small Business, making me the senior financial and operations executive for a $3 billion international brand and customer organization. And it was at IBM that I learned firsthand the value of how to work with cultural differences.
I was born in America, but I'm a child of immigrants. My father immigrated to the United States from Italy when he was just five years old and settled in a small, rural town in New York State with his mother, father, and brother. Like many immigrants at the time, they went through Ellis Island. My father went to college, but he left before he received his degree—he needed to work to provide
