A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

166 ■ A CLASS WITH DRUCKER
best, the misallocation of scarce and valuable human resources. To design
a job properly, the objectives and requirements of the job must be thoroughly
considered to decide those few requirements that are really crucial
to the job’s performance. That way, the executive seeking to fill the position
can avoid filling it <strong>with</strong> a candidate who minimally meets all requirements
rather than staffing for strength, based on the few critical areas of
the job that are essential.
During the Civil War, President Lincoln wanted to promote Ulysses S.
Grant to be general-in-chief of Union forces. One of Lincoln’s cabinet officers
offered the opinion that Lincoln should not think too highly or expect
too much of Grant, because he drank hard liquor to excess. Lincoln
retorted: “Please find out his brand, that I may send a case to all my generals.”
Grant was Lincoln’s only general who consistently won victories, and
he eventually defeated Robert E. Lee which finally ended the war. Grant, by
the way, was another individual who while successful in the Mexican War,
had failed miserably at various previous appointments in the peacetime
Army and even as a clerk in a retail store before the Civil War.
<strong>Drucker</strong> also felt that by thinking through the job <strong>with</strong> an emphasis on
the few essential requirements, a manager would avoid the danger of
structuring a job around a specific individual. He was very much against
this. In his opinion, this could lead to conformity, favoritism, or both, and
accordingly he opposed this practice. Moreover, a restructuring of a job
around an individual would create a chain reaction, <strong>with</strong> everybody
changing their work and responsibilities to fit in <strong>with</strong> the new person’s
personality and way of doing business, causing immense disruptions to
the organization. New bosses may cause distruptions anyway, but nothing
compared <strong>with</strong> a complete redesign for the incoming personality.
I Disputed <strong>Drucker</strong> on This Rule
The only time that I challenged Peter was on this point, because of his
emphasis on avoiding, or at least minimizing, these disruptions. I didn’t
argue that a chain reaction of disruptions would not occur due to restructuring
a job. My argument was that such disruptions might be necessary in
certain instances and could have an overall positive result, despite the
drawbacks which Peter mentioned. In thinking through the requirements
of the job, I made the point that a manager needed to anticipate potential
disruptions and weigh them against the potential benefits that might ensue.