By the late '80s management problems began wearing on Jan not only mentally but physically. The signs began slowly. There were the bouts with bronchitis, the chronic migraines, the wild weight fluctuations of 30 pounds, and a loss of memory. "I would start a sentence and forget what I was going to say," she explains. In the summer of 1989 she was sitting on the beach with her son when her heart rate dropped to 39 beats per minute. "I was sure I was going to die," she recalls. At the hospital the doctors found no heart disease but cautioned Pringle to slow her pace. She didn't.
She wouldn't give any more credibility to criticism of her lifestyle than she would to criticism of her company. "If I don't stop, I won't see it," she claimed. Slowing down was tantamount to leaving the company, and that just wasn't under consideration. "I have appointments to keep, employees depending on me," she proclaims. Even when on vacation, she and her husband typically got more than a dozen calls a day from the office. "Look, it's our name on the door."
By the fall of 1989 Pringle was battling a chronic case of the shakes and had no energy. Friends and colleagues urged her to slow down. Her own husband resorted to behind-the-scenes tactics: before she picked up her mail, he'd throw out invitations to evening galas he thought she could afford to miss. He didn't have much of a choice, he explains. "Jan isn't the kind of person you can tell to put on the brakes."
The only person who even stood a chance was Judy Williams, Jan's closest friend. Williams also owned a public-relations firm, and she and Jan spoke on the phone at least twice a week. Late in the summer of 1989 they slipped away for a five-day vacation in Acapulco.
There Pringle let Williams speak to her as no one else had. "I told Jan she had to stop defining herself by work and clients and start defining herself by herself," recalls Williams. "Jan always had more energy than anyone else, but it was clear she was running real low." Pringle listened to her friend's advice but didn't know what to do with it. "If I stop," she wondered, "what will I do?"
Three months later Pringle got her answer. Paralyzed at her desk, unable to even call for help, she was finally forced to leave her agency, like it or not. Doctors told her she had chronic fatigue syndrome, a disease that sends the immune system into overdrive, causing total exhaustion. Called a "stress sensitive" disease, it has no known cause or cure.
During her treatment, Pringle's doctor asked her to write down everything she did in a day. Seated in front of that list, she first viewed herself and her company separately, from a distance. It was the first time, for example, that she realized she was serving on 31 committees. She realized how wedded she'd become to recognition and bigness -- "the new Mercedes, the Cartier watch, the bigger houses" -- and she realized she wasn't having fun anymore.
But Pringle was forced to forget that introspective moment when her husband developed his own medical condition -- a chronic back problem that required surgery and a long recovery -- and she was forced to take back the reins.
So in October 1990, nine months after leaving, Jan returned to work while Jim left for surgery. She reentered the company not quite sure of what her sabbatical had taught her, not quite sure of how she could -- or would -- change.
She tried to fall into her familiar role: cheerleader. Clearly, morale needed a lift. Too much work and too few people to do it were taking their toll. Hoping to turn the tide, she staged a companywide party at a local athletic club. Employees were handed T-shirts emblazoned with the credo "PDP -- We've Got a New Attitude."
But day in, day out Pringle struggled to find her place. "People had filled in while I was gone," she declares. "There was this sense of 'Who is she, waltzing in and taking over again?' " Nowhere was that sentiment more evident than in Pringle's relationship with her second-in-command. He had helped fill the leadership vacuum in her absence, but now she was back -- more than filling the vacuum. "We argued about everything." Pringle wasn't ready to give up anything. A few weeks later he resigned.
And there was more disruption to come. Late one Sunday night the Pringles' longtime banker approached the two with some bad news. He was sure that their chief financial officer was embezzling money from the company -- $55,000 to date, some from the corporate coffers and some from the Pringles' personal savings account. With the money, the CFO had bought a new Mercedes and a computer. Both Pringles were shocked. The CFO was a seven-year veteran of the company, a hardworking member of the "family."
The next day, calm and composed, Jan approached her CFO with the evidence. He didn't deny the accusations. Instead he agreed to "a leave pending further investigation" and left his office and the building quietly. That night, though, he took a gun to his head and shot himself.
For Jan, it was the first time that she openly wondered if she had what it took to lead PDP. She spoke to her priest; she called her friend Williams; she began seeing a therapist.
Over and over she replayed the confrontation, wondering if there was anything she could have done differently -- any words she should have held back. In the end she resolved that she'd been calm, perhaps stern, but never accusatory -- and that the mental stability of an employee was out of her control.
