How To Perform a Heart Transplant and Survive Through Layoffs.

what they didn't teach in biz school

ONE COLD WINTER NIGHT in 1996, Robert Forney, then the CEO of the Chicago Stock Exchange, boarded a bus destined for a troubled inner-city neighborhood. It was Forney's first excursion with the Night Ministry, a homeless relief agency he joined to set an example for his employees.

The message he hoped to send the skeletal staff then running the exchange -- which Forney himself had earlier downsized to 172 from 1,000 employees -- was a complicated lesson in receiving through giving, dedicated to a staff that had become hooked on self pity during hard times facing the then-struggling exchange.

Drawing from a half-recollected sermon, Forney gave everyone in the company a task: choose a charitable outlet of their own.

"Another manager would have approached this in an entirely different way, but I think I was right to do it," Forney reflects. "When I realized we needed a work ethic transplant I saw we also needed a heart and brain transplant."

But choosing to work with a charity meant facing the unfamiliar. Forney was "scared to death," driving through Chicago's tough neighborhoods that winter night. He wasn't sure he'd be able to relate to the street people he saw through the bus windows.

"I had so much and they had so little," he says. "I anticipated their anger and anxiety."

Forney wasn't born to comfort and privilege. As a 10-year-old, he used the wages from his first job as a department store janitorial assistant to buy an electric blanket for his unheated attic bedroom in Indiana.

But years of striving, and succeeding, in the business world had distanced him from that life. So much so that the emotional outpouring he encountered that night came as jolt: "It was the most love I've seen exchanged at any one time in my life," he recalls. "It was about helping one person get through one night. It was almost like we were meant to meet each other."

Not only did Forney undergo a personal transformation, he witnessed the same among his staff. He believes the exchange's commitment to charity helped foster a turnaround. By the end of his six-year tenure in 2001 the exchange was a new place, achieving a compound growth rate of 80-plus percent, increased productivity of at least 50 percent, and 15 times as many seats on the exchange.

Forney recently left the exchange. Since May 2001, he's been the CEO of Chicago-based America's Second Harvest, the nation's largest hunger relief organization.