Page 173 - Executive Warfare

The People You Have to Motivate

bosses earlier in my career had asked me to lie to a senior officer or
stonewall him, I wouldn’t have done it. But these characters were loyal
only to Sam and weak in terms of their loyalty to the organization, so they
had to go.
Despite the mass execution, this story has a happy ending. Suddenly
people all over the organization were blurting out all kinds of things to
me I’d never learned before—information that was very helpful, as well
as some I didn’t need.

DON’T ALLOW YOUR SUBORDINATES TO
DRAG YOU ONTO THE TENNIS COURT
The problem with reaching down below your direct reports too often,
even for information, is that you may give the impression that you are
accessible to everybody. And the next
time anybody at any level has any kind
of problem, they may think that they IF YOU ANSWER
should come to you to fix it. Then you 200 E-MAILS
find that you’re like Jimmy Carter, FROM YOUR
deciding who plays on the White House EMPLOYEES ONE
tennis court, while the great issues of DAY, THE NEXT DAY
the day go unaddressed. YOU’RE GOING TO
You cannot give 5,000 people unfet- HAVE TO ANSWER
tered access to your office. Those exec- 300.
utives who brag that everybody in the
company has their e-mail address are
just absurd. That is one of the dumbest things I have ever, ever heard. If
you answer 200 e-mails from your employees one day, the next day you’re
going to have to answer 300.
And soon people are writing to you,“My boss was unfair to me. What
are you going to do about it?” The next thing you know, you are being
deposed in a lawsuit, which represents even more time spent managing

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