The next day, I opened the meeting by saying, “Okay, I am the one who drove the last business into a ditch, so why should you trust me this time?” Then I had my management team present every aspect of the business, including the financials—especially the financials, down to every penny we had in the bank and all the debt—and the complete product and business strategy. Full transparency again, after a period of necessary obfuscation. It mostly worked. Of the eighty people who attended the off-site, all but four stayed with the company through our ultimate sale to Hewlett-Packard five years
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