Page 43 - Executive Warfare

Attitude, Risk, and Luck

Let me give you an example. I was once in one of those general stores
you find in small Vermont towns that have everything. This store had a
little restaurant, made sandwiches to go, and sold coffee mugs, sweat
shirts, and canned tomatoes. I went to check out, and near the box of
maple-sugar moose candies by the cash register, there was a board with
Xeroxes of people’s driver’s licenses and the checks they’d bounced.
And I saw one of my own employees there. It wasn’t a very big check,
something around $37.90. He wasn’t a
criminal, obviously.
THE FIRST THING
But every time I saw that guy after
PEOPLE ARE TOLD
that—or glanced at his name on a list of
WHEN THEY GO
possible promotions—I thought, how
INTO POLITICS IS,
responsible can he be?
“GET USED TO THE
Virtually everybody in business is
SCRUTINY.” THIS
supposed to have some knowledge of
APPLIES JUST AS
how things work financially, if only to
WELL TO HIGHER
control their own budgets. Fail to pay
MANAGEMENT.
your child support or have your wages
garnisheed by the IRS, and your chances
of being promoted even at the most senior level go out the window.
You can’t allow your own aggressive tendencies to make you irrespon-
sible, either. There are a lot of Type A personalities in senior positions, and
they’re very, very competitive in everything they do. I mean, they play cro-
quet competitively.
I can remember an incident from a conference I attended many years
ago that was one of the stupider things I’ve ever witnessed. A tennis game
was scheduled, mixed doubles, with the CEO’s wife and another execu-
tive’s wife playing against two senior managers, one of whom we’ll call
Charlie.
The two women were decent enough tennis players, but the men were
much stronger. What should have been a friendly game turned into a
fiercely competitive one. Instead of gauging his serve to the skill of his

23