Hopping over the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 11 Person to Person: From Management to Corporate Citizenship

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

—Lao Tzu, Chinese Philosopher

If you are interested in learning about the United States during the Golden Years, I encourage you to pick up a copy of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. You’ll get a sense for an America of white shirts, thin ties, blue and gray suits, wingtips, and corporate conformity. Because postwar corporations were chock-full of returning soldiers, a command-and-control philosophy was effective and accepted. At that time the United States had very little competition for world economic domination, having seen most of the developed world decimated by the horrors of World War II. Essentially, the United States was a global manufacturing monopoly at a time when demand for goods was exploding. The powerful combination of increasing supply and demand created real wage growth and the rise of a financially secure middle class. People took pride in living a modest life. If you had a small home, car, TV, and home-cooked meals, you were living the good life.

With all that was going on in the country, a command-and-control management style worked well. The rise of technology, however, has made management much more complex. In today’s world, newer management principles are now the norm.

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As I mentioned in Chapter 8, I model my management style after Welch—or Larry ...