I saw no point in being the richest man in the cemetery.
There rarely is a conflict between a person’s strengths and the way that person performs. The two are complementary. But there is sometimes a conflict between a person’s values and that same person’s strengths. What one does well—even very well—and successfully may not fit with one’s value system. It may not appear to that person as making a contribution and as something to which to devote one’s life (or even a substantial portion thereof).
I, too, many years ago, had to decide between what I was doing well and successfully, and my values. I was doing extremely well as a young investment banker in London in the mid-1930s; it clearly fitted my strengths. Yet I did not see myself making a contribution as an asset manager of any kind. People, I realized, were my values. And I saw no point in being the richest man in the cemetery. I had no money, no other job in a deep Depression, and no prospects. But I quit—and it was the right thing. Values, in other words, are and should be the ultimate test.
The important thing is not that you have rank, but that you have responsibility.
The person with the most responsibility for an individual’s development is the person himself—not the boss. The first priority for one’s own development is to strive for excellence. Workmanship counts, not just because it makes such a difference in the quality of the job done, but because it makes such a difference in the person doing the job. Expect the job to provide stimulus only if you work on your own self-renewal, only if you create the excitement, the challenge, the transformation that makes an old job enriching over and over again. The most effective road to self-renewal is to look for the unexpected success and run with it.
The critical factor for success is accountability—holding yourself accountable. Everything else flows from that. The important thing is not that you have rank, but that you have responsibility. To be accountable, you must take the job seriously enough to recognize: I’ve got to grow up to the job. By focusing on accountability, people take a bigger view of themselves.
When I was thirteen I had an inspiring teacher of religion who one day went right through the class of boys asking each one, “What do you want to be remembered for?” None of us, of course, could give an answer. So, he chuckled and said, “I didn’t expect you to be able to answer it. But if you still can’t answer it by the time you’re fifty, you will have wasted your life.”
I’m always asking that question: “What do you want to be remembered for?” It is a question that induces you to renew yourself, because it pushes you to see yourself as a different person—the person you can become. If you are fortunate, someone with moral authority will ask you that question early enough in your life so that you will continue to ask it as you go through life. It is a question that induces you to renew yourself, because it pushes you to see yourself as a different person—the person you can become.
The greatest waste of resources in all the organizations I have seen is the failed promotion.
Why should people who, for ten or fifteen years, have been competent suddenly become incompetent? The reason in practically all cases I have seen, is that people continue in their new assignment to do what made them successful in the old assignment and what earned them the promotion. Then they turn incompetent, not because they have become incompetent, but because they are doing the wrong things.
What the new assignment requires is not superior knowledge or superior talent. It requires concentration on the things that the new assignment requires, the things that are crucial to the new challenge, the new job, the new task.
Traditional organizations rest on command authority. Information-based organizations rest on responsibility.
When a company builds its organization around modern information technology, it must ask the question: “Who requires what information, when and where?” And then those management positions and management layers whose duty it has been to report rather than to do can be scrapped.
But, the information-based organization demands self-discipline and upward responsibility from the first-level supervisor all the way to top management. Traditional organizations rest on command authority. Information-based organizations rest on responsibility. The flow is circular from the bottom up and then down again. The information-based system can, therefore, function only if each individual and each unit accepts responsibility: for their goals and their priorities, for their relationships, and for their communications. This in turn makes possible fast decisions and quick responses. These advantages will be obtained only if there are understanding, shared values, and, above all, mutual respect. If every player needs to know the score, there has to be a common language, a common core of unity. If the organization is information-based, diversification in which financial control is the only language is bound to collapse into the confusion of the Tower of Babel.
Advancement into “management” will be the exception, for the simple reason that there will be far fewer middle-management positions to move into.
Opportunities for specialists in an information-based business organization should be more plentiful than they are in an orchestra or hospital, let alone in the India civil service. But as in these organizations, they will primarily be opportunities for advancement within the specialty, and for limited advancement at that. Advancement into “management” will be the exception, for the simple reason that there will be far fewer middle-management positions to move into.
But to professional specialists—and to their management colleagues—the only meaningful opportunities are promotions into management. And the prevailing compensation structure in practically all business reinforces this attitude because it is heavily biased toward managerial positions and titles. There are no easy answers to this problem. Some help may come from looking at large law and consulting firms, where even the most senior partners tend to be specialists and associates who will not make partner are outplaced fairly early on. But whatever scheme is eventually developed will work only if the values and compensation structure of business are drastically changed.
Information specialists are tool makers. They can tell us what tool to use to hammer upholstery nails into a chair. We need to decide whether we should be upholstering a chair at all.
A requirement of an information-based organization is that everyone take information responsibility. The bassoonist in the orchestra takes information responsibility every time he plays a note. Doctors and paramedics work with an elaborate system of reports and an information center, the nurses’ station on the patient’s floor. The district officer in India acted on this responsibility every time he filed a report. The key to such a system is that everyone asks: “Who in this organization depends on me for what information? And on whom, in turn, do I depend?” Each person’s list will always include superiors and subordinates. But the most important names on it will be those of colleagues, people with whom one’s primary relationship is coordination. The relationship of the internist, the surgeon, and the anesthesiologist is one example. But the relationship of a biochemist, a pharmacologist, the medical director in charge of clinical testing, and a marketing specialist in a pharmaceutical company is no different. It, too, requires each party to take the fullest information responsibility.
All the specialists in the hospital share a common “score”; the care and cure of the sick.
What can we say about the requirements of the information-based organization? Several hundred musicians and their CEO, the conductor, can play together because they all have the same score. Similarly, all the specialists in the hospital share a common mission: the care and cure of the sick. The diagnosis is their “score”; it dictates specific action for the X-ray lab, the dietitian, the physical therapist, and the rest of the medical team. Information-based organizations, in other words, require clear, simple, common objectives that translate into particular actions.
Because the “players” in an information-based organization are specialists, they cannot be told how to do their work. There are probably few orchestra conductors who could coax even one note out of a French horn, let alone show the horn player how to do it. But the conductor can focus the horn player’s skill and knowledge on the musicians’ joint performance. And this focus is what the leaders of an information-based business must be able to achieve. And information-based business must be structured around goals that clearly state management’s performance expectations for the enterprise and for each part and specialist and around organized feedback that compares results with these performance expectations so that every member can exercise self-control.
