Page 30 - Executive Warfare

Introduction

Consider the case of publisher Judith Regan. Her career at Harper-
Collins ended in late 2006, thanks in part to the controversy surrounding
her acquisition of what many viewed as a confessional book by O. J. Simp-
son. Regan had brought so many successful books to HarperCollins.You’d
think that when she was fired, her
coworkers would, at a minimum, have
SOME OF THE mourned the loss of future revenues.
PEOPLE JUDGING Instead, there was no shortage of them
YOU WILL willing to share their glee with the press.
INEVITABLY BE And let’s admit the truth: Some of the
MEAN, POWER- people judging you will inevitably be
MAD, mean, power-mad, incompetent, or just
INCOMPETENT, OR plain crazy. I’ve seen people in all kinds
JUST PLAIN CRAZY. of senior management jobs that I
I’VE SEEN PEOPLE wouldn’t allow to litter-train my cat.
IN ALL KINDS OF And yet they were responsible for hun-
SENIOR dreds or thousands of careers.
MANAGEMENT As you go along, you may also find it
JOBS THAT I very difficult to measure your own suc-
WOULDN’T ALLOW cess. At a certain level, your bosses cease
TO LITTER-TRAIN giving you praise when you do well.
MY CAT. High performance is simply expected.
And when you do badly, you now have
enough power of your own that you probably won’t be killed off directly,
unless you do something truly offensive, like date the boss’s spouse. Now
it’s a matter of how many dents you take.You’ll take some unavoidably, but
you can’t take too many—and how many are too many?
You may find it difficult to assess your performance even by your own
standards. For most of your career, you’ve almost certainly succeeded by
being an expert of some kind or other—engineer, tax specialist, commu-
nity organizer, professor of anthropology—and by managing small groups
of people on projects you’ve understood better than anybody else. With a

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