Page 57 - Executive Warfare

Attitude, Risk, and Luck

a “No”before they get a “Yes.”Therefore, everything to them is just a ques-
tion of finding someone to say “Yes.” The problem is that you’re squan-
dering your organization’s resources on those yeses, and soon no one values
your opinion.
Other managers become reckless in their risk taking simply because the
pressure is on them to generate new rev-
enue. I’ve seen university development
people, for example, launch capital cam-
JUST AS
paigns prematurely, before lining up big
DANGEROUS AS
donors. They do it because their compe-
THE RISK-LOVERS
tition’s doing it, and they fail miserably
ARE THOSE PEOPLE
because they just haven’t done the
WHO NEVER SAW A
proper research.
PROJECT THEY
Just as dangerous as the risk-lovers
DIDN’T WANT TO
are those people who never saw a proj-
KILL.
ect they didn’t want to kill. Everything’s
bad. Every potential product is bad,
every proposal for a new computer system is bad, every new idea is bad.
These people often come from the financial side, where they have got-
ten the impression that things don’t need to be sold in order for money
to arrive. They’re terrible for an organization because nothing ever gets
done in their area. Their thinking is that if the risk is not taken, there is
no downside.
Well, they’re wrong. The downside is that no money comes in. Con-
sider Detroit, where there seems to be a lot of these people. The mind-set
is, “We’ve made big cars all of our lives. We’re going to continue to make
big cars. It’s always served us well. If the public doesn’t like it, too bad.”
So then what happens is that the Japanese start making smaller, more
fuel-efficient cars that are also more reliable, and Detroit gives up market
share to Japan and begins a downward spiral. What’s really unbelievable
is that this same thing has now happened to the American car companies
twice in my lifetime.

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