ABSTRACT
Executives spend more time on managing people and making people decisions than on anything else, and they should. No other decisions are so long-lasting in their consequences or so difficult to unmake. Managers making people decisions will never be perfect, of course. But they should come pretty close to batting 1.000, especially because in no other area of management do we know so much. Some executives’ people decisions have, however, approached perfection. At the time of Pearl Harbor, every single general officer in the US Army was overage. There is high risk in picking managers in professional organizations—in a research lab, say, or an engineering or corporate legal department. Making the right people decisions is the ultimate means of controlling an organization well. Such decisions reveal how competent management is, what its values are, and whether it takes its job seriously.
