It's Not the How or the What but the Who

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Prehistoric Hardware; Victorian Software

In October 2011, I spoke at the World Business Forum, a gathering of four thousand senior executives and middle managers in New York. I started by asking the audience, “How many of you have made major mistakes while making crucial people choices?” All four thousand people raised their hands.

That group was not alone. All managers struggle to get people right (and if they say they don’t, they’re lying). As Jack Welch, the legendary former CEO of General Electric, put it to me a few years ago, “Making great people decisions is brutally hard.” He confessed that, as a junior manager at GE, he probably got 50 percent of his appointments wrong; thirty years later, as CEO, he was still wrong 20 percent of ...