How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 7. Forty-Nine Grievances

One sunny Texas Saturday morning in 1998, I was mowing my lawn on my little green and yellow John Deere tractor. When I turned for a pass toward the back door, I could see that my wife was walking toward me, making that slash-across-the-throat motion that meant shut it down. I had a phone call. Normally, she wouldn’t have interrupted my yard work, but this was Ray Lane. Ray was the president and chief operating officer of Oracle Corporation. He was my boss’s boss. He had never called me before.

A customer in Southern California was having some crippling performance problems. They couldn’t take orders, they couldn’t ship orders, they couldn’t process return merchandise authorizations…they couldn’t really do much of anything. This was a multibillion-dollar company, and these problems were costing them millions of dollars every day. Ray told me that at the trajectory they were on, they would be out of business by Friday.

And here’s why it was Ray calling instead of someone else: this company had made it clear to the COO of Oracle Corporation that if they went out of business, they would “do everything in their power to take Oracle down with them.” Ray told me to assemble my team Sunday evening in Orange County, with anybody at Oracle I wanted to take with me. I did.

We assembled Sunday night at our hotel. On Monday morning, my dream team and I walked through the doors of a profoundly broken company. Everything was hard, even the easy things. Even ...