alexander

Leadership Process One: Reframing Problems 51
keting routines: focus groups, test marketing, and all the
rest. The company encouraged its design engineers who
thought of an injection-molded plastic product that they
would use at home or anywhere else to create that product
and launch it with the torrential flood of other new products.
Rubbermaid’s unorganized action was preferable to
organized inaction.
Related to the selection of heirs is the modern human
resources example of succession planning, which is not a
last-minute process. Often we do not know who would be
the best replacement. Commonly, we reframe the decision
from selecting the leader to selecting the front-runners who
compete in a leadership tournament. One lesson is to expeditiously
select who will compete in that tournament.
(Conversely, announcing succession too far in advance can
have negative effects: eliminating constructive competition,
losing valuable also-rans, and, occasionally, insurrection.)