Page 58 - Executive Warfare

EXECUTIVE W ARF ARE

Playing safe is often the riskiest thing you can do in a career. If you stand
still, the odds are overwhelming that the world will leave you behind.
You cannot encourage the people
underneath you to play safe, either. You
BE OPEN TO NEW
set the tone. If you have a low tolerance
IDEAS, BUT DO THE
for any kind of mistake from the people
WORK TO ANALYZE
who work for you, you will only get safe
THE RISK.
decisions from them.
The most successful organizations
tend to be those where ideas flow freely, but where there are then mecha-
nisms in place to analyze whether or not those ideas make sense. Try to
follow the same pattern. Be open to new ideas, but do the work to analyze
the risk. Surround yourself with people who can give you good answers
as to what the risks really are.
Unfortunately, the more senior you become, the fewer mistakes you’re
allowed because bad outcomes become more public. If you bat .300, you’re
a star in Major League Baseball, even though you’re wrong 70 percent of
the time. Just try getting away with that in corporate life.
And if a risk goes south on you, you need to fess up early. I can remem-
ber when I first took over a big department at John Hancock, the Group
Department. We were the largest group
health and life insurer in the country. I

KNOW WHEN TO had a bunch of IT people telling me that
TAKE YOUR we had to put a new claims system in
place.
PUNISHMENT FOR
Although it was going to cost $120
A BAD BET.
million, they promised that it would
save us many millions every year. It
seemed like a reasonable bet, except that the time frame kept moving out-
ward and the price tag kept rising.
I was too young in my business career to understand what was really
going on. There were hundreds of people working on this project, and

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