“If we didn’t spend four hours on placing a man and placing him right, we’d spend four hundred hours on cleaning up after our mistake.”
During the years in which I attended the meeting of GM’s top committees, the company made basic decisions on postwar policies such as capital investment; overseas expansion; the balance between automotive businesses, accessory businesses, and nonautomotive businesses; union relations; and financial structure…. I soon realized that a disproportionate amount of time was taken up with decisions on people compared to the time spent on decisions on policy. On one occasion the committee spent hours discussing the work and assignment of a position way done the line…. As we went out, I turned and said, “Mr. Sloan, how can you afford to spend four hours on a minor job like this?” “This corporation pays me a pretty good salary,” he said, “for making the important decision, and for making them right… If that master mechanic in Dayton is the wrong man, our decisions might as well be written on water. He converts them into performance. And as for taking a lot of time, that’s horse apples” (his strongest and favorite epithet)…. “If we didn’t spend four hours on placing a man a placing him right, we’d spend four hundred hours on cleaning up after our mistake—and that time I wouldn’t have. The decision,” he concluded, “about people is the only truly crucial one. You think and everybody thinks that a company can have ‘better’ people. All it can do is place people right—and then it’ll have performance.”
ACTION POINT: Make decisions on people—selection, placement, and evaluation—your top priority.
Adventures of a Bystander
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker