Investors and half of Wall Street were asking whether he was up to the task. But I—and everybody else who worked closely with him—knew that he had both that calculating Six Sigma mental toughness (Jack Welch would have never let him close to the corner office without it) as well as an appreciation for the “softer skills”—including empathy, storytelling, and connecting with people, especially customers—that he seemed to have picked up while he was in marketing and sales earlier in his career. And he believed strongly in the power of communications, in story, as a transformative leadership tool.
