I still remember the day in 1999 that Dayton Hudson made a fateful decision to stop making Frango mints in the windowed kitchens of its historic Marshall Field's State Street store in Chicago, choosing to outsource production of the mints to a Pennsylvania confectioner that could make the candy more cheaply. The decision resulted in the layoff of 150 workers, many of them women who had toiled in the legendary Field's kitchens their entire career. The resulting news coverage criticized Dayton Hudson, and the decision brought a stinging public rebuke from Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who had taken a keen interest in nurturing and growing the confectionery sector in the city.

Often, we seize upon icons that define what a great brand means to us - its dimensions, its "feel," the memories a brand evokes, the experiences we have with a brand as consumers. Where Dayton Hudson stumbled as owner of Marshall Field's, the new owner of the Marshall Field's chain, Federated Department Stores, recently took the very icon of the retailer - Frango mints - and turned a former public relations debacle to its advantage in announcing its plans for the new Macy's store on State Street.

Chicago has ruminated for months now over Federated's plans to convert the Marshall Field's chain to its Macy's brand. More than 60,000 people signed an online petition in an effort to preserve the Marshall Field's name - to no avail. If not for the foresight of Federated CEO Terry Lundgren, the wrangling over the name change would have continued. Lundgren knows shoppers and retailing. In a recent piece on Federated, The New York Times reported that Lundgren understands that consumers care more about symbols and traditions than they care about the names behind them. So when he spoke to a Chicago audience recently, he defused some tensions by announcing that major investments will be made to retain and restore historic traditions and features of the State Street store. And he closed his remarks by announcing that Macy's would begin manufacturing Frango-mint-flavored cheesecakes in Chicago. The following day, his announcement dominated local headlines. The little mint that could thus returned as an important symbol of respect and tradition, linking Marshall Field's to the new Macy's.

I came to know the late Stanley Marcus, the legendary retailer of Neiman-Marcus fame, in the 1980s during my years in Dallas. I had the pleasure of writing speeches for him and working with him to document an oral history of Neiman-Marcus, during which time he told me that great retailers "walk the floors" of their stores and truly understand their associates and their customers. "Consumers are statistics," he once said. "Customers are people." A younger Terry Lundgren led Neiman-Marcus at an earlier time in his career, when Stanley Marcus was chairman emeritus, and he learned well the lessons of building a great brand.

The real challenge for Federated and Lundgren will be how the company proceeds in mobilizing its employees to live the new Macy's brand as it renames several venerable retail chains representing more than 400 stores in 11 regional chains. That challenge of aligning the external brand of the company with the internal brand - the Insidedge concept of creating "One Voice, One Look" - will be formidable. More than a decade of work with leading multinational corporations has taught our consulting team that mergers often fail because companies are unsuccessful in melding together disparate cultures and in communicating how the new organization will benefit employees and the customers they serve. Through their words and actions, CEOs take center stage in determining how their organization will meet the challenges that come with change.

Companies today grapple with a host of issues - downsizing and right-sizing; offshoring jobs in world markets; adopting new organizational models; paring compensation and benefits programs; globalizing in distinct new cultural markets; wrestling with the constraints of today’s ethical and corporate governance standards; diversifying employee populations to meet societal and customer expectations; adopting new performance standards that challenge historic employee covenants; marshaling employees to “live the brand” with the attending priorities of customer service and corporate social responsibility, to name several that spring to mind. Given these challenges, is it any wonder that 60 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs enjoy a tenure of less than six years?

Great leaders know the importance of creating a clear business strategy and compelling message platform to bring employees together to drive a new corporate culture for the purpose of establishing shared beliefs, shared values and a commitment to new performance standards. Newspaper morgues and Internet archives are littered with example after example of spoiled mergers and transformation efforts resulting from a failure to learn these lessons. In many cases, those who led these unsuccessful efforts have fallen and their legacies have been tarnished.

Time will tell how Macy's fares in its transformation. I recently visited a new Macy's outlet to buy a shirt, and the transaction required the use of two different credit processing systems - one for the former Marshall Field's, the other for Macy's - to complete my purchase. I asked the salesperson when the systems would converge to make the purchase process simpler, and he didn't know. "We're waiting to be told," he responded. "We want to make the buying process easier for our customers."

So it goes.