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Building Rome in a Day

Marty was calm and collected at the ensuing board meeting. In fact, he seemed even sharper than usual. It turned out he was just as good at playing downside situations as he was at leveraging upside opportunities. He went over the options with the board, and it was decided we had best try to negotiate a decent merger agreement with Healtheon/WebMD. It was a classic case of “if you can’t beat them, join them.” The problem was that we were well aware that the underpinnings of Healtheon/WebMD were very weak. The company had been built up based solely on the vision of future performance, yet the market was valuing it at $7 billion. Unfortunately, our most promising road to success meant merging with them and doing the hard work necessary to make it all a reality.

As unbelievable as it seems, Medical Manager Corporation and Healtheon/WebMD announced their merger agreement just three weeks after we learned of the Envoy deal. It was on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2000. The deal valued Medical Manager Corporation at $3.5 billion, and Wall Street characterized it as the merger of two behemoths in the health-care industry. It drew headlines everywhere. The announcement pushed Medical Manager’s stock price to a peak of $86 a share. This can be compared to $17.60 per share when we went public three years earlier.

The joy was short-lived. The infamous Internet bubble, caused by overinflated expectations for Internet companies, began to burst just weeks after the merger announcement. We had not even closed the deal, yet by April 2000, Healtheon/WebMD had already lost 70 percent of its value. Our stock fell accordingly because it was tied to their stock by the merger agreement. It was all pretty much a disaster, and the only hope left was to do the hard work necessary to restructure the entire company.

The task was Herculean. WebMD was the quintessential Internet company, and the Internet bubble had just burst. WebMD’s stock had once traded above $100 per share. It was at $17.50 when we closed the deal, on its way to a low of $3 in August 2001. This called for drastic measures, and that is what it got.

Within a month of closing, Marty became chairman of the board, and he and his elite management team were running the company. I remained CEO of the Practice Services Division and sat on the board of directors of the combined company, which kept the name WebMD. Marty brought in a seasoned turnaround specialist, Marv Rich, to be president during the massive reorganization. The company was losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year and the bleeding had to be stopped. Marv’s job was to work his way through all the divisions and cut them down to core competency. All that would remain was that which aligned with WebMD’s core vision and could quickly begin earning its keep.

The task before us was breathtaking, and it provided tremendous growth for me, personally. I now found myself part of a team of executives who, instead of complaining, simply rolled up their sleeves and tackled this monumental project. Everyone was working day and night to do whatever was needed to right the sinking ship. For years I had been diligently working to free myself of that weak person inside who always insisted on things being the way he wanted. Now, nothing was the way anybody would have wanted. Yet everyone just took a collective deep breath and did whatever was asked of them. It was an amazing thing to be part of, and it taught me a lesson of inner strength that permanently changed me at a very deep level.

Marv called me one day and asked me to accompany him to California where the WebMD Internet site was being developed. If the company we had merged with had a main asset, this was it. Marv wanted me to act as a development specialist at meetings with the website’s development team. Most of the company’s losses were being generated by its Internet offerings, and this had to be dealt with. The problem was that, despite the losses, the development team was making enormous demands for salaries and benefits from the new WebMD management. They figured they were in the driver’s seat since they controlled the development of the company’s entire Internet offering.

I couldn’t believe what I saw when we arrived. More than eight hundred developers were working in a giant converted warehouse in Silicon Valley. It was tiny cubicle after tiny cubicle as far as the eye could see. I thought my development team in Alachua had expanded tremendously. We were around 250 people, but this development team was over three times that size, and everyone was packed in like sardines.

Unfortunately, the meetings didn’t last very long. Marv and I sat with their senior management team and listened to their demands. They had the demands nicely printed out in great detail on many pages. When they were done, Marv presented what he was willing to offer, which fit on one short page. The heads of development met among themselves and after a very short period of time came back to Marv with their reply—meet our demands or we’re leaving.

I had so much to learn from people like Marty and Marv, and I was completely open to the process. I would have thought that the next step was to figure out who we couldn’t live without and bite the bullet. That is not what happened. Marv spent a few minutes relaxing quietly, got up from his chair, and motioned me to walk with him. He left the meeting room and called together the entire development team right then and there in the open cubicle area. He explained that the top tier of their management had just resigned and anyone who wanted to go with them should make that decision at this time. Those who wished to stay would not be guaranteed a job, but over the next few weeks we would work together to see who was needed to keep the core development going. And that was that. Marv left a few of his people in charge of sorting out the exodus, and we left.

The only thing Marv ever said to me about the whole affair was that if you let people hold you hostage, they will force you to make terrible decisions, and you will lose. You might as well take your bumps up front and at least be in control of your destiny. Who would have believed that just a few months later, one of Marty’s senior executives would move the development of the website to New York and relaunch it with a team of less than forty developers. That new website became the foundation for WebMD’s entire future.

Again and again I was seeing that each of these intensely challenging business experiences was very beneficial for my spiritual growth. I just kept letting go of whatever discomfort got stirred up within me, and inevitably, a stronger flow of spiritual energy took its place. This growing strength helped prepare me for life’s next growth experience: what happened when Marv’s reorganization team finally got around to taking aim at my division.

Medical Manager Practice Services Division, as we were known at the time, was one of the largest divisions in WebMD. We had grown to almost two thousand employees, and that made us very ripe for cost cutting. With that in mind, Marv brought the reorganization team down to Alachua for two days of meetings. The first day was devoted to presenting our business plan and vision for the future. Fortunately, we were well prepared to take Marv through our current products with their highly successful revenue generation, as well as the products and services we were working on for the future. It certainly didn’t hurt when Sabrina was able to present the tremendous growth of Medical Manager Network Services from a few hundred thousand dollars a year to a fifty-million-dollar-a-year business in just over three years.

It was during these presentations that it really hit me what had happened. John Kang and I had set out to be sure that Medical Manager was not left behind by the enormous potential of Internet companies like Healtheon and WebMD. At the same time, Sabrina and I had been struggling to find a way to get Envoy, or some other clearinghouse, to evolve enough to be able to fulfill our vision for Network Services. Despite all the negative issues we were facing, the amazing reality was that when the smoke had cleared, we ended up owning all three of these companies—WebMD, Healtheon, and Envoy. Just a short time ago, no one could have even imagined how such a thing could ever take place. It was like so much else I had experienced; the unimaginable had actually happened.

The presentations to Marv and his team went very well. There was palpable excitement in the room throughout the day. Nonetheless, when I returned later that evening, I was shocked to see what had happened to the meeting room. Stretched around the walls of the room were computer printouts with the names of all the Medical Manager Practice Services Division’s two thousand employees. Hanging like wallpaper, they foreshadowed the day planned for tomorrow: every name on the list would need to be justified. I was aghast, especially since we had recently requested additional employees to keep up with our growth.

Returning home that evening, I was very concerned about the fate of my employees. Tomorrow could turn out to be a very ugly day. At the same time, I knew that Marv had to cut costs, and it was my job as a corporate executive to help him. This could have created a lot of inner tension, but I decided to just surrender to the reality of the situation and be open to balancing these two areas of concern. I came to peace that night knowing my heart was in the right place, and when tomorrow came, I would do the best I could.

The next morning when I entered the room, I was again shocked by what I saw. The printouts had been taken down, and the walls were back to normal. Before I could inquire what was going on, Marv’s second in command walked me out to the hall. He told me that he and Marv had met last night, and the decision was made to skip the “bloodletting” and allow us to continue the fine work we were doing. He told me they were very impressed with what we had achieved and with our plans for the future. As they saw no need for the second day of meetings, Marv had taken an early flight out. His team packed up, shook our hands, and went on their way. I have no idea to this day if the rest of my management team ever saw the ominous sight of those wallpapered walls.

I realized just how extraordinary these events were when a few hours later I received a call from the head of HR at corporate headquarters in New Jersey. He was completely beside himself. He playfully asked me what I had used to drug Marv while he was down here in Alachua. He went on to say that he doubted that such an event had ever taken place in the annals of corporate history. We were all well aware that Marv’s purpose in life was to cut costs. That he would come down here with that intention, and simply walk away, is a tribute to both the quality of our division and to Marv as a manager. Medical Manager and I received a number of tributes in 2000, but none was more meaningful to me than receiving such a vote of confidence from someone I respected so much.