In our case the answer was as obvious as the nose on your face. It was profitable to sign up Internet accounts. The problem was it took too long to collect the money from new sign-ups to pay the account acquisition costs. We were looking around for someone to underwrite our acquisition costs in the belief that our clients really wanted the service and were willing to keep paying for it. The industry was too new, however, for leaders to have any experience on which to justify that belief. Wherever we turned, every leading institution said no.

Then we realized there was one group of people who really knew that our subscribers wanted our Internet service, and they were willing to keep paying for it. That group was composed of the subscribers themselves. Why not have them underwrite our growth by paying for their first year of service up front? We figured all we had to do was offer the clients a meaningful discount and they’d be glad to pay up front. We eventually determined that by offering prospective clients three months free, a motivated sales force could get just under 20 percent to pay for the year up front. This wound up almost tripling the amount we’d bring in from new clients in the first months, and it allowed us to keep expanding when everyone but our public rivals were beginning to run dry.

Getting a motivated sales force together large enough to handle the new volume was another challenge. Fortunately, once again, the ruby-red slippers saved the day. We did, as it turned out, already have a fantastic sales force in place. They were busy selling thousands of businesses our domestic long-distance service bundled with free Internet access. This division was definitely profitable, but as long-distance service was such a competitive field, we were only able to sign up a few hundred new accounts per week.

So one day I called a big meeting and explained to all the domestic telecom sales managers that starting immediately, they were an Internet sales force. Of course, we kept on a skeletal crew to keep telecom going because I have a rule: You never give up a profitable business, and you never abandon a market niche, even if your foot is barely in the door.

Running a business, I’ve discovered, is much like fighting a war. If you want to be a great manager, you need to act like a great general. For instance, you have to be willing to deploy your resources into those areas where they can result in a big victory for you. You can’t win with an attitude that says, “this unit is specially trained in desert warfare, so I won’t use them to complete the encircling of an enemy battalion trapped in the jungle.”

To win a war you have to be willing to use your force in new and unexpected ways as the situation calls for it, though I don’t make such moves frivolously. I am often willing to move a talented executive from one division of the company to a totally different one, if I see that his or her unique skills can benefit us elsewhere. Occasionally, as in the case of going for the Internet opportunity, I’m even willing to move the whole division.

This is at variance with the way things work at large companies. There, executives and division heads stake out their own areas and become very territorial and possessive about their responsibilities, budgets, and personnel. Corporate politics make it almost impossible to redeploy people or resources out of one area and into another. The largeness of the company starts to become its own weakness. Even if one division starts to do great, it was the burden of carrying the whole company and its corporate infrastructure along with it.