Page 71 - Executive Warfare

Bosses

If you are willing to give the boss the truth, you’re probably going
to engage in some spirited debate with your boss as part of the decision-
making process.
This leads me to the second thing you need to do to be a valuable
instrument: Understand that once the decision is made, even if you
don’t agree with it and have argued against it, you must drop your
opposition and execute it to the best of
your abilities.
Until you are in the top slot at your
NO MATTER WHAT
organization, you have exactly this
BOSSES SAY, IT’S
much power: You have the right to
ALL ABOUT THEM.
carry out the boss’s directive in the
YOU ARE JUST AN
manner in which you believe it should
INSTRUMENT TO
be carried out. But you don’t have the
THEM. THEY’LL
right not to carry out the directive or
TREAT YOU WELL
to alter its course dramatically. I can’t
AS LONG AS
tell you how many people I’ve seen
YOU’RE USEFUL.
actually confuse this.
For example, I had a guy who worked
for me at John Hancock. When I would
tell him,“I’m going to green-light these projects. Show me your timetable
for delivering them,” he would show me a timetable. And then he would
go off and redo the timetable, as if we’d never talked about it, because he’d
decided it was wrong.
What, are you kidding me?
You do, however, now have enough power not to put up with much
nonsense. For example, I once had a boss who would schedule staff meet-
ings and then bring his secretary in and dictate memos to his boss for an
hour as we just sat there—and we were all senior people. The boss pre-
tended that this was an efficient means of communicating with us, but it
was really just raw arrogance. Excuse me, listening to dictation is not a
staff meeting. So I just stopped going to the meetings.

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