Up the Organization

If your business is in Cleveland, start or acquire an operation in Santa Barbara at your peril. Absentee management is fatal.

There is nothing wrong with having personal friendships with representatives of those companies with whom we do business. However, this cannot be permitted to extend to the giving or receiving of gifts.

Small privately owned businesses are tempted in hot stock markets to register with the SEC and sell a little stock.
Result One: The stock is quoted.
Result Two: The few employees and friends who own registered stock sell or buy a few shares a week and the stock moves!
Result Three: The company doesn’t sell the 15-million-dollar convertible issue that is needed for solid expansion (“Gee, the stock is selling at 14 dollars a share—the company is worth 60 million dollars—why should we give away 40 per cent of it for 15 million dollars”). Or management is afraid to shut down the perennial loss division (“It might hurt the price of the stock”).

design, the “B-School” trains a senior officer class, the non-playing Captains of Industry. People who, upon graduation, are given a whirlwind tour of their chosen company and then an office and a secretary and some work to do while they wait for one of the top three slots to open up.
This elite, in m

The worst wives (from the standpoint of the effect on their husbands) in my experience are the overly ambitious ones. They seem to be constantly after their husbands to make more money. They don’t understand that money, like prestige, if sought directly, is almost never gained. It must come as a byproduct of some worthwhile objective or result which is sought and achieved for its own sake.

Don’t be needlessly cruel in firing someone. Figure out a reason that is true but enables him to preserve his ego.

Keep in mind that first impressions of performance are often wrong. There are slow starters who become stars, and flashes in the pan who sputter out.

Many give lip service, but few delegate authority in important matters. And that means all they delegate is dog-work. A real leader does as much dog-work for his people as he can: he can do it, or see a way to do without it, ten times as fast. And he delegates as many important matters as he can because that creates a climate in which people grow.

These directors are generally disastrous in their effect upon young managements. If not firmly under the thumb of the chief executive, they indulge a nervous impulse: they keep pulling up the flowers to see how the roots are growing.

Bill’s approach is different. He has said to his general counsel: “I don’t want to read any legal documents covering transactions I’ve approved. If I have to sign them, then you initial them for legal aspects, and get the affected division or department head to initial for operating aspects. But remem