Page 267 - Executive Warfare

The New Bosses

ness smarts to their charitable work, too. As Rockefeller Foundation Pres-
ident Judith Rodin told Fortune about Bill and Melinda Gates,“They care
deeply, deeply, deeply about making a difference, but they don’t get starry-
eyed. They demand impact.”
With bosses like this, you cannot afford to be complacent. You must
deliver results.

EVERYBODY WITH AN INTERNET CONNECTION—
YOU ANSWER TO THEM, TOO
While new information technologies have been great for business and have
enabled smart executives to reach out to their customers in much more
compelling ways, they have also given many more people influence over
executives’ careers than most of them would like.
When it comes to the Internet, it is still surprising to me how many
executives do not grasp the immediate power of information transfer. In
just my own career I’ve seen a transfor-
mation from the time when only five
people got the memo because that’s as
WHEN YOU’RE IN
deep as a carbon would go. Then the
THAT WHIRLPOOL,
Xerox machine became commonplace,
EITHER DEVELOP
and hundreds of people could be
AN EXIT STRATEGY,
handed a copy. Then word processors
OR MAKE SURE
arrived, and you could pump out as
THAT YOU ARE
many drafts of as many memos as you
CAPABLE OF
wanted and send them through fax
DELIVERING THE
machines.
RETURNS THESE
Then came the Internet and e-mail.
OWNERS DEMAND.
Now anybody can instantly send the
memo to anybody around the world or
make it publicly accessible on a Web site. This is what allowed al Qaeda to
thrive even after losing its home base in Afghanistan in 2001.

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