Bob Harlan was enough of a realist to sense the urgency required of him if he was going to achieve his goal of restoring Green Bay Packers football to a pedestal befitting the NFL's most storied and successful franchise.

He also was enough of a visionary to see the big picture and how business as usual would no longer allow the small-town Packers to stay the course on the path of sustainability.

Thus, Harlan's 18½-year tenure as the chief executive officer of the Packers resulted in one of the most remarkable on-field turnabouts in NFL history and secured the long-term financial future of the organization through its first stock sale in 47 years and the redevelopment of Lambeau Field.

Those crowning accomplishments will be Harlan's lasting legacy.

Harlan died Thursday, March 5, at age 89. He was still living in Green Bay at the time and had been recently hospitalized with pneumonia.

Harlan was elected CEO and the ninth president of the Packers on June 5, 1989, and served as head of the organization until Jan. 28, 2008. First hired by the Packers in 1971, Harlan worked for the organization for 37 years in all. He had been chairman emeritus since 2008.

"The Packers family was saddened to learn of the passing of Bob Harlan," Packers President and CEO Ed Policy said today. "Bob was a visionary leader whose impact on the franchise was transformational. From his inspired hiring of Ron Wolf to turn around the club's on-field fortunes to his tireless work to redevelop Lambeau Field, Bob restored the Packers to competitive excellence during his tenure and helped ensure our unique and treasured flagship NFL franchise was on sound footing for sustained generational success."

On top of his tangible successes, Harlan also will be long remembered for his endearing and homespun leadership style.

"Bob's personal touch as president was something that we all can learn from," Mike McCarthy, Packers coach in Harlan's final two seasons as president, said in a recent interview. "He just had a way. He trusted you. I loved his leadership style.

"I thought he was incredible in front of the media, in front of the fans. His people skills were a tremendous gift. Ted (Thompson) used to call him 'the silver tongue' because we'd always say, 'No one can say it like Bob.' He was great for Ted and me. Special man. I'll always be so grateful to him."

Thompson served as Packers general manager from 2005-17.

In late November 1991 with the Packers having just suffered their ninth loss in 11 games as a continuation of a free-fall that had started 24 years earlier, Harlan fired Tom Braatz as vice president of football operations. Within a week, Harlan hired Ron Wolf in a more expanded role as general manager.

At the time, in the NFL world, firing the head of player personnel in the midst of a season was rarely done. Even more unusual was hiring a replacement in-season and immediately restructuring the lines of authority in a team's football operation.

But less than two years into his presidency, reality had hit home for Harlan. The Packers' 10-6 finish in 1989, his first year as CEO, was merely an aberration. What's more, the divided lines of authority at the time between Braatz and head coach Lindy Infante were doomed to fail.

In Wolf, Harlan hired someone who was groomed to succeed unlike the string of bad hires the Packers had made since 1968.

Wolf had 29 years of NFL experience in player personnel, mostly with the Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders over a period when they won three Super Bowls. Over his time there, Wolf had cut his teeth in the game and become a trusted advisor to Pro Football Hall of Fame executive Al Davis.

Harlan lured Wolf to Green Bay by giving him total authority over the football operation and then paved the way for his success by keeping his promise.

Over his first 75 days on the job, Wolf convinced the most coveted young coach on the market that year, Mike Holmgren, to come to work for the then woebegone Packers; and acquired Brett Favre, who in his first season solved the Packers' quarterback woes that dated to the start of Bart Starr's arm problems in 1968.

"He was a man of his word," Wolf said of Harlan after both had retired. "He said he was going to hire me to run the football operation and he wouldn't get in the way, and he never got in the way."

On the business side, two decisions that were crucial to the Packers growing their bottom line and remaining financially competitive were leaving Milwaukee after the 1994 season to play all of their home games in Lambeau Field, and pressing other NFL owners in 1997 to approve the franchise's first stock sale since 1950 and one that raised $24 million.

But nothing showed more vision on Harlan's part than the remake of Lambeau.

Around the time Lambeau Field turned 40 in 1997, through the lens of football fans and insiders, including the likes of John Madden, it was hailed as a bucket-list must and a shrine to pro football.

But what few realized other than Harlan and his financial experts on the executive committee was that the stadium was becoming economically obsolete before it was going to become physically outdated.

With those warnings in mind, Harlan formed a vision for a retro-redo of Lambeau that would become a daily destination for both Packers and other pro football fans; and then exhaustively worked to sell the idea first to state and local politicians and then to voters who would be asked to partly pay for the $295 million project.

"Without the redeveloped Lambeau, we would have run into financial oblivion," Packers treasurer John Underwood said in a 2004 interview. "Our profitability would have gone in a tank. We wouldn't have been able to build our corporate reserve account. We wouldn't have been able to pay the bonuses to win."

Under Harlan's leadership, the Packers won Super Bowl XXXI to cap the 1996 season, another NFC championship in 1997 and enjoyed 13 winning seasons over a 16-year span from 1992 to 2007. And the winning hasn't stopped. The Packers won another Super Bowl two years after Harlan retired and have made the playoffs 25 times in the last 34 seasons.

What was viewed as an anachronistic franchise mired in the longest losing cycle of its then 72-year existence when Harlan was elected CEO – or as Wolf put it, "the place where GMs and players went to die" – is now widely viewed as a model franchise.

"The management style here, there's nothing like it," said McCarthy, who is the second winningest coach in Packers history. "Ron Wolf taught me this. I was here only one year (as an assistant) with Ron in '99. But I heard Ron say this a number of times: 'Do not kill the golden goose that laid the golden egg.'

"We have a responsibility to this organization because no one has the setup that we have. It was always about football. You never heard about the business challenges. You never even heard those things in a football space back in those days."

Compared to his predecessors, Harlan never experienced the Packers' death-bed moments the way Andrew Turnbull, Lee Joannes and Emil Fischer had. And the mess Harlan inherited maybe wasn't as bad as what Dominic Olejniczak faced during a 1-10-1 finish in the first of his 24-year tenure as the franchise's president.

But the Packers were certainly at a crossroads in their history when Harlan was elected, and his tenure was arguably as consequential as that of any other president going back to 1923 when the franchise became a community property.

"Bob's biggest influence is everyone's looking at the Packers and seeing a really long string of success," former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said when Harlan was inducted into the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame in 2004. "People are looking at Green Bay and saying, 'What's the formula over there?'

"They've done it with class, they've done it with a focus on the game and a focus on the fans."

Born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Harlan graduated from Marquette University in 1958, then spent six years as its sports publicity director. In 1965, he was hired by baseball's St. Louis Cardinals to head their community relations and speakers' bureau. Three years later, he became their public relations director.

Harlan was hired by the Packers In 1971 to be assistant general manager under Dan Devine. Over the next 18 years, he held various administrative titles with the team before being elected president and CEO.