Page 138 - Executive Warfare

EXECUTIVE W ARF ARE

board of directors. They are wearing your brand, even if you inherited
rather than picked them.
Former Disney Chairman Michael Eisner succinctly sums up what’s at
issue here in the autobiography he wrote with Tony Schwartz, Work in
Progress: Risking Failure, Surviving Success: “Executives can be judged on
many qualities, but high on my list is how well they hire. Insecure man-
agers invariably choose weak, nonthreatening subordinates. Confident
managers hire the best people they can find, aware that improving over-
all performance will ultimately redound to their credit.”
Let me extend this idea further: If
you hire fools or lunatics, well, people
will start to worry that you may be fool-
IF YOU HIRE FOOLS
ish or crazy yourself. And they might be
OR LUNATICS,
right!
PEOPLE WILL
The truth is that you are allowed a
START TO WORRY
certain number of personnel mistakes
THAT YOU MAY BE
as you rise, but not many. It’s similar to
FOOLISH OR CRAZY
the difference between somebody who’s
YOURSELF.
been divorced and somebody who’s
been divorced as often as a Gabor sister,
those three fixtures of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood who ran
through 20 husbands among them.
In the first case, well, the person has made a mistake or two—we’re all
only human. In the second case, you start to look at the person and think,
“You’re the problem.”

WHEN IT COMES TO OUTSIDERS, MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE
Every personnel choice you make in upper management is risky, but espe-
cially risky is bringing in a senior person from outside the organization.
You are subjecting the group to new DNA—inserting a fish gene into
a tomato, in effect—and people view the end result with the same suspi-

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