Page 31 - Executive Warfare

Introduction

move into higher management, however, you’re suddenly thrust into a
new role, one where you are now managing experts in fields you have no
knowledge of. It’s a case of the blind leading the sighted, and if that role
fails to alarm you, you’re either too full of yourself, too immature, or just
too plain stupid to be successful.
And when you move up, you’ll be represented by people whose names
you barely know because you no longer have six or ten people working
for you. You now have a hundred or a thousand or five thousand. Yet the
quality of your hiring decisions—and the hiring decisions of the people
you’ve hired—looms large as people judge your ability to lead.
What’s more, you may well find yourself being blamed for problems
that you had no part in creating simply because you are the person now
in charge. In organizational life, they do sometimes kill the messenger.
Finally, you may find yourself struggling with geopolitical turmoil—
redrawn national boundaries or your old commander-in-chief ousted and
replaced by a stranger—while you’re in the midst of battle.
For example, it’s been virtually impossible in recent years to pick up
the business pages of any newspaper without seeing scandal after scandal
breaking: books cooking, options backdating, lying to Wall Street, lying
on Wall Street, plus the ever-popular personal peccadilloes story. Every
one of these scandals represents career
upheaval for more people than you
might guess. Even more career plans are IN
thrown off track by mergers and acqui- ORGANIZATIONAL
sitions and dislocations in the economy,
LIFE, THEY DO
such as the one set in motion by the
SOMETIMES KILL
subprime mortgage crisis.
THE MESSENGER.
And in an information age when a
single careless comment can live on in
infamy, even nonprofits and universities are no longer the calm, secure
berths they once were. In late 2005, University of Richmond President
William E. Cooper was done in by a moment of excessive honesty when

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