Speaker: At Hewlett Packard, we’re integrating two companies, and I had a chance to speak about that twice early this morning where the former Compaq and the former HP are now one company called HP. And so, the speed changes every day, and we are just right on the edge all the time of crashing, in terms of how fast can we go, and we are forced by competitive pressures and by our own eagerness to do it well, to be right on the edge, so sometimes we have, sometimes we bump the wall, veer over and, you know, bump another tire, or something, or a fender on another car or something. So we are just right on the edge, and some of the efforts that I lead, we’re right on the edge, and so I think that is great thinking, and I can relate a lot of examples, but I will just say in general the pace at which we implement our merger is one where we are right on the edge of being out of control, and that keeps us sharp; I don’t think we have lost control anywhere that we’ve you know, spun out and gone up in flames, but at the same time, that feeling of we’re going too fast, you know we don’t have it all figured out. Absolutely, everyday we don’t have it figured out, and we are making decisions quickly and going anyway.

Dr. Reimann: Marie, you want to try?

Speaker: Well, I can go with a history of this for almost ten years. My very concrete example is the Tennessee Quality Program that went from conception, an idea, to reality in a very short period of time. We’re talking less than a year. And since the get go of Tennessee Quality, where big corporations may measure their cash flow in months if it’s good, or days. We have a program that measures its cash flow in hours, and the issue being you have to be able to stay ahead of the pace to be able to keep providing value, understanding that literally, our cash flow is hours; it’s the difference between staying in business and staying out of business.

Dr. Reimann: Jessie?

Speaker: The best example that I can think of recently is our company had a plant that burned a few years ago, and Mr. Milliken was in a meeting in Spartanburg, with his management team, and coincidentally and fortunately the entire sales force for the covering organization was meeting in another conference room in that building. When the word came that the plant was on fire, it wasn’t many minutes until the word came that there was no chance to save it because it really went up quickly, Mr. Milliken just stopped his meeting and said, I know we are talking about important things, but I can’t think about that right now. He sat there for about five minutes and thought, then he got up and he went to the floor covering sales meeting, and he says “gentlemen, we have just suffered a terrible tragedy . . .”, but he said “we have to look at this as an opportunity to be better . . .” he said “we are going to rebuild this plant, and we are going to rebuild it in record time, and our target is to have production occurring again within six months”. This was ¾ of a million square foot plant that employed about 700 people, and some very high technology equipment that was unique to us; our research facility had developed and built a lot of the equipment. And his challenge to everybody was to rebuild that plant in six months. What he told his sales organization is that you will lose some orders, because with projects going on and building under construction, we can’t possibly supply the carpet that they are going to need in the next three months. He said “we know we are going to lose some orders, but your job is to not lose any customers”. He said “you have to go out and convince our customers that you are going to be better, and that we are going to be back quickly, and that even though somebody else has to get the orders, will get the orders now, we are going to be there as an important factor”. And in fact, the best example of that is the Delta Airlines terminal in the Atlanta Airport, because they were within 8 or 9 months of delivering the carpet that was going to be in there for the Olympics in Atlanta. They convinced Delta that we had a plan, that we would be able to come back, and that we would deliver the product and we did. Mr. Milliken then established about 17 or 18 teams to work on various aspects of rebuilding that plant. Those teams met and did their jobs quite effectively as a result of that, so I think that’s as good of an example as I can think of.