In May of last year, as I was sitting on an airplane flying to the West Coast, I thought to myself,“What have I done?” I had just quit my job at Kraft Foods—the only company I had ever worked for—where I had enjoyed a long and successful career and had made lifelong friends. Now I was moving not only myself but also my family from Chicago to Los Angeles, where I was about to become CEO of a troubled company in an industry I didn’t know anything about.
A version of this article appeared in the November 2001 issue of Harvard Business Review.
