Cutting Deep

Resilience is so important in leadership. Can you describe a time when you found your resilience tested and when it was hard to keep going in the face of adversity?

I think we hit a stage at Ariba, where the enterprise software market just dropped off the table. And you know, just probably six months before that, I remember one of our board members, he realized that Ariba is worth more than General Motors, you know, I'm like, Oh, my God. He goes, "Do you think that's going to last forever?" I go, "I don't think it's going to last forever." He goes, "What are you going to do about it?" I go, "Three things. First of all, we're going to put as much cash in the bank as we can. We're going to buy companies with their stock, and we're going to get 10 years' worth of customers." But then when that didn't happen, I remember going into the board meeting and going, "By show of hands," and it was clear we needed to lay off people. And I go to the board, "By show of hands, how many of you have been involved in a layoff?" Everybody raise their hand. I said, "Okay, by the show of fingers, how many layoffs have you been involved with?" And there was, I donÕt know, 27 fingers that went up. And I said, "Now by show of fingers, how many times when you had the layoffs did you come back and say, 'Shoot, we cut too deep?'" Not one finger went up. I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, we're going deep." And we did, those were tough things.

I remember going from office to office, as we were laying people off, and I was saying, "You know, this is to really keep the company alive." And obviously, it was a blip. I mean, now $3 trillion of commerce goes through the Ariba Network, but you know, that was a tough time. And yeah, it's tough to get out of the bed, you want to just crawl up in a fetal position under your desk, and you just got to keep going. I think the thing that inspires me, of course, during those tough times, is my family and my friends and then also your coworkers or your teammates. So that's the kind of thing that inspires me. You got to get up out of that fetal position.