Page 136 - merged.pdf

•116 The 100 Greatest Business Ideas of All Time

There is some truth in the observation that all presidents or chairmen eventu-

ally fail. If you keep managing a company the chances are that you will drop the ball

at some point. If this is true, then Townsend’s final chapter ‘Wearing out your

welcome’ has a powerful force behind it.

‘Nobody,’ he writes, ‘should be Chief Executive of anything for more than five

or six years. By then he’s stale, bored and utterly dependent on his own clichés –

though they may have been revolutionary ideas when he first brought

If you keep them to the office … After five or six years a good Chief will have ab-

managing a sorbed all the hostility he can take and his decisions will be reflecting a

company the desire to avoid pain rather than to do what’s right.’

chances are ‘Lesson for stockholders and directors: If the Chief Executive doesn’t retire

that you will gracefully after five or six years – throw the rascal out.’

drop the ball at Perhaps his overall message comes through best with this: ‘There is

some point. nothing fundamentally wrong with our country except the leaders of all

our major organisations are operating on the wrong assumptions. We’re

in this mess because for the last two hundred years we have been using the Catholic

Church and Caesar’s legions as our patterns for creating organisations. And until

the last forty or fifty years it made sense. The average churchgoer, soldier and fac-

tory worker was uneducated and dependent on orders from above. And authority

carried considerable weight because disobedience brought the death penalty or its

equivalent.’

In an article published in Playboy in 1970, Townsend ventured into the mine-

field of attitudes to women at work and the glass ceiling. His style does not change

and his sympathy for working people shines through the hard hitting prose of ‘The

Guerrilla Guide for Working Women.’

He pulls no punches, as with:

‘Q – Your job has grown to include occasional overnight travel. Your husband

and kids feel this cuts into their time.