The distance between the leaders and the average is a constant.
In human affairs, the distance between the leaders and the average is a constant. If leadership performance is high, the average will go up. The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. She therefore makes sure that she puts into the leadership position, into the standard-setting, the performance-making position, the person who has the strength to do the outstanding, the pacesetting job. The always requires focus on the one strength of a person and dismissal of weaknesses as irrelevant unless they hamper the full deployment of the available strength.
The task of an executive is not to change human beings. Rather, as the Bible tells us in the parable of the talents, the task is to multiply the performance capacity of the whole by putting to use whatever strength, whatever health, whatever aspiration there is in individuals.
Leadership is the lifting of a man’s vision to higher sights.
The leader who basically focuses on himself or herself is going to mislead. The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any other trio in history: Hilter, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader’s charisma. For leadership is not magnetic personality—that can just as well be demagoguery. It is not “making friends and influencing people”—that is flattery.
Leadership is the lifting of a man’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a man’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a man’s personality beyond its normal limitations. Nothing better prepares the ground for such leadership than a spirit of management that confirms in the day-to-day practices of the organization strict principles of conduct and responsibility, high standards of performance, and respect for the individual and his work.
I always ask myself, would I want one of my sons to work under that person?
What would I look for in picking a leader of an institution? First, I would look at what the candidates have done, what their strengths are. You can only perform with strength—and what have they done with it? Second, I would look at the institution and ask: “What is the one immediate key challenge?” I would try to match the strength with the needs.
Then I would look for integrity. A leader sets an example, especially a strong leader. He or she is somebody on whom people, especially younger people, in the organization model themselves. Many years ago I learned from a very wise old man, who was the head of a very large, worldwide organization. He was in his late seventies, famous for putting the right people into the right enterprises, all over the globe. I asked him: “What do you look for?” And he said: “I always ask myself, would I want one of my sons to work under that person? If he is successful, then young people will imitate him. Would I want my son to look like this?” This, I think, is the ultimate question.
The more the organization grows, the more the individual can grow.
The more the individual in an organization grows as a person, the more the organization can accomplish—this is the insight underlying all our attention to manager development and advanced manager education today. The more the organization grows in seriousness and integrity, objectives and competence, the more people scope there is for the individual to grow and to develop as a person.
The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.
Morality, to have any meaning at all, must not be exhortation, sermon, or good intentions. It must be practices. Specifically:
The focus of the organization must be on performance. The first requirement of the spirit of performance is high performance standards, for the group as well as for each individual.
The focus of the organization must be on opportunities rather than on problems.
The decisions that affect people—their placement, pay, promotion, demotion, and severance—must express the values and beliefs of the organization.
Finally, in its people decisions, management must demonstrate that it realizes that integrity is one absolute requirement of any manager, the one quality that he has to bring with him and cannot be expected to acquire later on.
The responsible worker has a personal commitment to getting results.
But there also is the task of building and leading organizations in which every person sees herself as a “manager” and accepts the full burden of what is basically managerial responsibility: responsibility for her own job and work group, for her contribution to the performance and results of the entire organization, and for the social tasks of the work community.
Responsibility, therefore, is both external and internal. Externally it implies a accountability to some person or body and accountability for specific performance. Internally it implies commitment. The Responsible Worker is a worker who not only is accountable for specific results but also has authority to do whatever is necessary to produce these results and, finally, is committed to these results as a personal achievement.
The modern enterprise is a human and social organization. Management as a discipline and as a practice deals with human and social values. To be sure, the organization exists for an end beyond itself. In the case of business enterprise, the end is economic; in the case of the hospital, it is the care of the patient and his or her recovery; in the case of the university, it is teaching, learning, and research. To achieve these ends, the peculiar modern invention we call management organizes human beings for joint performance and creates social organization. But only when management succeeds in making the human resources of the organization productive is it able to attain the desired outside objectives and results.
Management is no more a science than is medicine: both are practices. A practice feeds from a large body of true sciences. Just as medicine feeds off biology, chemistry, physics, and a host of other natural sciences, so management feeds off economics, psychology, mathematics, political theory, history, and philosophy. But like medicine, management is also a discipline in its own right, with its own assumptions, its own aims, its own tools, and its own performance goals and measurements.
In an ecology, the “whole” has to be seen and understand and the “parts” exist only in contemplation of the whole.
In the world of the mathematicians and philosophers, perception was “intuition” and either spurious or mystical, elusive, mysterious. Perception, the mechanical worldview asserts, is not “serious” but is relegated to the “finer things of life,” that is to things we can do without. In the biological universe, however, perception is at the center. And of course any “ecology” is perception rather than analysis. In an ecology, the “whole” has to be seen and understood and the “parts” exist only in contemplation of the whole. Three hundred years ago, Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” We will now have to say also, “I see therefore I am.”
Indeed, the new realities with which this book deals are configurations and, as such, call for perception as much as analysis: the dynamic disequilibrium of the new pluralisms, for instance; the multinational and transnational economy and the transnational ecology; the new archetype of the “educated person” that is so badly needed.
