Losing It! Behaviors and Mindsets that Ruin Careers: Lessons on Protecting Yourself from Avoidable Mistakes (Andrew Dearman's Library) by Bill Lane

Author:Bill Lane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FT Press
Published: 2012-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Micromanage

I’ve claimed before, in other screeds, that Welch had the intellectual capacity and sense to micromanage at incredibly deep levels within the company when necessary, to actually add value. I still believe that meddling and kibitzing to a degree—and always when an organizational survival issue is involved—is a necessity, not an option.

If you are true to yourself and understand that you do not have the intellectual bandwidth (as the now-tired cliché goes), bring in that circle of trusted, well-paid friends and confidants. Send them out to sniff around, grasp, and digest for you the issues, the data, and any suspicions they may have. Then have them come back and feed them to you until you have an iron grip on the whole thing and are hyperbole-proof when you step into the briefing room with the people running the troubled, promising, or risky venture or business.

The first time or two you paralyze some feather merchant with an observation that flashes in the room like lightning at night, you will find that the bullshit stops. Its purveyors will begin to glance stealthily at each other: “Uh oh, can’t fool this guy. Bag all those charts.”

When you show, with a couple of animated and insightful comments (sarcasm is good), that you understand the issue and resent the disingenuous tone and content of this presentation—and that the next time you are the target of wool-pulling, the perps will be fired on the spot—straightforwardness and candor with the boss will no longer be an issue.

Mark Vachon disagrees with me on the “micromanagement” issue. His views should trump mine, since he was CEO of GE Medical Systems, Americas. My views are based on writing speeches for Welch, managing a few speechwriters, and running the major company meetings. But I was a pretty good close-up observer of management triumph and tragedy, hence this book.

In any case, Vachon says he does like to “go in the forest to look at the trees,” but he disputes the fact that you should occasionally swim around like a catfish at the bottom of the organization. His view is, “Get into detail until you see a pattern; then tell the team, ‘Here’s where we’re going.’” This coincides, tangentially, with Condron’s view that you should get deep into the details until your gut tells you that you have someone in place whom you can implicitly trust for her judgment, integrity, and knowledge of the game; then get off her back and move on.

I cornered the British captain of a cruise ship at the captain’s cocktail party, as we wandered pleasantly down the Caribbean. I told him the subject of this book and began a minor rant on how another Brit captain (Smith, by name) had attended a cocktail party in his honor as the ship sped through an ice field in the North Atlantic. He cut me off, with some irritation, and observed that no icebergs had been sighted recently in the Caribbean, that attending these functions was part of his ordered duties, and that he was on top of every function in the vessel he commanded.

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