Page 211 - Executive Warfare

Position

When I first started working at John
Hancock, I had enormous respect for the CEO at the time, a man named
Jack McElwee. He had been a fighter pilot in World War II, so he arrived
at the bubble world of executive success with an unusual amount of life
experience. Jack told me once that upward motion in a career usually
occurs when an organization is shaking for some reason or another.
“There’s often a domino effect,” he said. “So never be out of position.”
I was only 34 when he gave me that piece of advice, and I didn’t quite
know what it meant.
But I began to learn over the years. First, I learned that you never know
what is going to happen in an organization. I’ve already mentioned that
one of my colleagues was killed in a hunting accident. He was only one
man, but change rippled through the organization as soon as he was gone.
He’d been on track to possibly be the next president. Suddenly, somebody
else was running his division, somebody else was heir apparent to the pres-
idency, and other people were moving in to replace the replacements. As
Jack had said, there was indeed a domino effect.
Second, I learned that when the dominoes start shifting, luck favors
those people who have already begun maneuvering themselves into the
positions they want. Because I’d already declared myself as wanting a big
revenue job, I was not out of position when that shotgun went off. So I
was given more revenue responsibilities,
which put me on track to rise.
In other words, I was able to move LUCK FAVORS
from “diner” to “hunter,” a step up in THOSE PEOPLE
the modern organizational caste system, WHO HAVE
which hasn’t progressed very far from ALREADY BEGUN
the caste system in your average Nean- MANEUVERING
derthal cave. THEMSELVES INTO
Let me explain: There are three kinds THE POSITIONS
of people in any organization. First, THEY WANT.
there are the hunters, who go out with

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