“I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.”
Hiring and Developing
From “The CEO as Coach: An Interview with AlliedSignal’s Lawrence A. Bossidy,” conducted by Noel M. Tichy and Ram Charan and published in the March-April 1995 Harvard Business Review. Bossidy had spent 34 years at GE, rising to vice chairman under Jack Welch, before becoming chairman and CEO of AlliedSignal in July 1991. The interview ran three and a half years into the turnaround. Ram Charan, one of the two interviewers, later co-wrote Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (Crown Business, 2002) with Bossidy.
Bossidy gives developing equal billing with hiring. Hiring is a one-time call per role; developing is years of in-person coaching with the people already in the building. Most “bet on people” framings emphasize the first half. The interview’s title, “The CEO as Coach,” names which half Bossidy thought the CEO had to do personally.