Stretch, Don’t Stress: A CEO’s Lessons in Building Growth Without Burnout

One underappreciated responsibility of public-company leadership is not simply setting ambitious goals, but matching those goals to what an organization can realistically achieve. Leaders must ensure that demands on employees do not exceed the tools, staffing, and time available to do their jobs well.

Stretching people, challenging them to improve and gain the confidence that improvement brings, is energizing. Stressing employees by setting targets that make them feel like failures if they fall short, or by forcing unreasonable hours and deadlines, destroys health and wellbeing.

Stretch energizes. Stress exhausts. Exhausted organizations make bad decisions, miss weak signals, and quietly erode trust.

Achieving stretch without stress requires leaders to think expansively about opportunity while remaining brutally honest about capability and risk. 

It took me several years into my tenure at Pitney Bowes to find that equilibrium. But the market environment shifted so dramatically before at about the time I retired that most CEOs and boards in our industry who served after my retirement, including ours, struggled to find paths to growth that did not over-stress their organizations.

Stage 1: Irrational Exuberance

Between 1996 (when I became CEO) and 2000, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan described the stock market environment as one of “irrational exuberance.” Stock prices exceeded intrinsic value, and investors punished companies that failed to deliver exceptionally aggressive growth forecasts.

Jack Welch at GE became the industry role model. He appeared to deliver consistent double-digit earnings growth by expanding financial services businesses with massive, deeply hidden downstream risks.

Our stock rose from $24 a share in 1996 to an all-time high of 71⅜ in July 1999. Had we simply extrapolated our growth rates from that period, our market capitalization could have reached $75 billion within a decade. 

The projection was mathematically elegant, but strategically unrealistic. It would not survive unknown, but likely, adverse events. Like many companies, we internalized irrational exuberance.

Stage 2: A Dose of Reality (1999–2001)

Between early 1999 and the end of 2001, a series of events brought us back to earth. Highly profitable fax and copier revenues dropped sharply after 1998, which caused us to spin off both businesses in December 2001. Our mortgage servicing business was hit by an accounting mandate that exaggerated volatility and risk. In the third quarter of 2000, we missed our earnings guidance.

By 2001, we were at a crossroads. We needed a more sustainable way to define opportunity, one that stretched the organization without stressing it, and a more disciplined approach to risk.

At the same time, we faced a panicked reaction from employees and investors to the perceived threat of Internet postage. Despite strong operating performance, our stock fell sharply well before the earnings miss, reinforcing fear and organizational uncertainty.

We were beginning to stabilize when we experienced two back-to-back crises in the fall of 2001: the loss of four employees in the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax bioterrorism crisis, which struck 20 mailrooms, including the U.S. House of Representatives mailroom we operated.

We acknowledged these tragedies and their human impact. But we also asked a critical leadership question: what realistic opportunities might our response create, and how could we pursue them without compounding stress?

Stage 3: Opportunity Hidden in Plain Sight

By 2001, a better strategy was hiding in plain sight. While first-class mail volumes had flattened, the broader mailstream solutions market exceeded $250 billion. With the right mix of organic investment and acquisitions, we could outperform even as our largest legacy business faced limited growth.

The key was deciding where we could win credibly. We focused on adjacent businesses that leveraged existing capabilities rather than requiring heroic cultural or technical reinvention. At the same time, we invested in businesses such as address management, location intelligence, and presort services, that would remain viable even if first-class mail declined.

We repositioned ourselves as a “mailstream solutions” company rather than simply a “mailing” company. That shift gave employees, customers, and investors a more durable narrative and allowed us to reset expectations so that what we promised externally aligned with what employees could realistically deliver.

That balance enabled us to stretch the organization without breaking trust. Over time, we completed roughly 80 acquisitions, entered mail presorting, expanded address management services, and, through the acquisitions of Group 1 and MapInfo, built a strong position in location intelligence.

The Mathematics of Stretch Versus Stress

Beneath these strategic moves was one of the least discussed leadership disciplines: how objectives are set and communicated.

Our public goals were credible and achievable. Internally, however, stretch had to exist. Our CFO, Bruce Nolop, articulated a simple framework:

Externally communicated goals should be achievable essentially 100% of the time.  Internally, individual units should have objectives that collectively exceed the enterprise target, with enough difficulty that some units will fall short while others outperform.

That cumulative stretch drove innovation and accountability without creating the feeling of an endlessly accelerating treadmill.

Front-Line Metrics Shape Culture

Executing this balance required close attention to front-line metrics. Customer service productivity, call-center response times, sales quotas, and technician utilization may sound neutral, but they shape daily behavior, emotional energy, and customer outcomes.

We learned this repeatedly. Overly complex sales promotions sometimes overwhelmed order processing and support teams. Simplifying the commercial environment improved morale and service quality almost immediately.

Sales quotas worked well overall, but uneven alignment between quotas and realistic opportunity in certain geographies or product lines created hidden stress, even as market share remained strong.

Metrics that ignore human reality eventually fail, no matter how elegant they appear on spreadsheets.

Managing Pace, Cost, and Risk

Another persistent source of stress was misjudging the pace of adoption for new products and services. Forcing adoption faster than customers or governments could handle created internal chaos and external resistance. Leadership must manage not just the direction of change, but its speed.

Cost reduction required similar care. In 2003 and early 2004, we reduced service technician headcount too aggressively following early digital rollouts. The short-term costs in customer distress, employee stress, and execution quality were higher than anticipated.

Efficiency gains are real. But people absorb change at human speeds, not spreadsheet speeds.

At the same time, some of the most powerful improvements were small, local, and unglamorous, minor revenue enhancements or cost reductions that compounded meaningfully over time.

Strategic Inflection Points

There is no substitute for continuous risk assessment. I remain a strong believer in Andy Grove’s concept of “strategic inflection points,” moments when fundamental forces shift by an order of magnitude.

That inflection point hit our industry with the 2008 financial crisis, after I announced my retirement. Mail volumes were undermined from an unexpected source: a financial crisis that abruptly and irreversibly burst a consumer credit bubble that had pumped by mail volumes from 2001 to 2008. When it burst, mail volumes collapsed, but few initially understood why.

Despite having teams focused on mail market forecasts, their strategists’ insights were undervalued. Counterintuitively, when a company's major end market is in free fall, employees experience severe stress when the leadership and the Board of Directors do not react quickly enough and act as if they were leading a fragile start-up or early-stage growth company. Most of the mailing industry, including boards and leadership teams, adapted too slowly to the new reality.

Many, including Pitney Bowes, opted to find new growth by placing one or two large bets instead of multiple smaller ones, but it is a high-risk strategy and it did not work to produce an adequate growth path. When those bets fail, the stress on employees is devastating.

The Leader’s Real Job

Culture, capabilities, and market conditions should drive strategy. Execution must be matched to what is achievable with a given workforce. Objectives, staffing, and processes must stretch employees to succeed, but not push them beyond their limits.

This is not a formula. It is an art. And it is one of those leadership capabilities most often recognized only when it is absent.