The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials)

by Peter F. Drucker

But also, as every executive has learned, nothing new is easy. It always gets into trouble. Unless one has therefore built into the new endeavor the means for bailing it out when it runs into heavy weather, one condemns it to failure from the start. The only effective means for bailing out the new are people who have proven their capacity to perform. Such people are always already busier than they should be. Unless one relieves one of them of his present burden, one cannot expect him to take on the new task. The alternative—to “hire in” new people for new tasks—is too risky. One hires new people to expand on already established and smoothly running activity. But one starts something new with people of tested and proven strength, that is, with veterans. Every new task is such a gamble—even if other people have done the same job many times before—that an experienced and effective executive will not, if humanly possible, add to it the additional gamble of hiring an outsider to take charge. He has learned the hard way how many men who looked like geniuses when they worked elsewhere show up as miserable failures six months after they have started working “for us.” ■ An organization needs to bring in fresh people with fresh points of view fairly often. If it only promotes from within it soon becomes inbred and eventually sterile. But if at all possible, one does not bring in the newcomers where the risk is exorbitant—that is, into the top executive positions or into lead...