The Moral Manager and Decision Making

Abstract

CEOs see themselves in a mirror and are seen by others through a window. A mirror view reveals the caricature drawn by an unknown author, who wrote:

As nearly everyone knows, an executive has practically nothing to do except to decide what is to be done; to tell somebody to do it; to listen to reasons why it should be done in a different way; to follow up to see if the thing had been done; to discover that it has not; to inquire why; to listen to excuses from the person who should have done it; to follow it up again to see if the thing has been done, only to discover that it has been done incorrectly; to point out how it should have been done; to conclude that as long as it has to be done, it may as well be left where it is; to wonder if it is not time to get rid of a person who cannot anything right; to reflect that he probably has a wife and a large family; and that certainly any successor would be just as bad, and maybe worse; to consider how much simpler and better the thing would have been done if one had done it oneself in the first place; to reflect sadly that one could have done it right in twenty minutes, and, as things turned out, one has had to spend two days to find out why it has taken three weeks for somebody else to do it wrong.

Excerpts from The Moral Manager, Ballinger Publishing Co., Cambridge, MA, 1988 and Ethos and the Executive, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1969.