ABSTRACT
Executives spend more time on managing people and making people decisions than on anything else, and they should. Managers making people decisions will never be perfect, of course. People decisions may also fail because a job has become what New England ship captains 150 years ago called a “widow-maker.” When a clipper ship, no matter how well designed and constructed, began to have fatal “accidents,” the owners did not redesign or rebuild the ship. Widow-makers—that is, jobs that regularly defeat even good people—appear most often when a company grows or changes fast. 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. No matter how hard managers try to keep their decisions a secret—and some still try hard—people decisions cannot be hidden.
