Tenure Isn't Judgment

From the first chapter of Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis’s Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls (Portfolio, 2007), under a heading they call “Tour de Judgment.” The authors argue that “the essence of leadership is judgment” and that a leader’s record is mostly the sum of the calls they make.

Tichy and Bennis put judgment at the core of leadership, and they make the case with two heavily credentialed executives. Michael Armstrong took over a $130 billion AT&T in 1997; the book blames his “long string of poor strategic judgments,” and by 2005 a “nearly dead-broke” AT&T had been sold to a former subsidiary. Carly Fiorina arrived at HP “hailed as a transformational leader” and left six years later with the stock down 58 percent. Both had the tenure and the pedigree; neither had the record. And the record is the only thing the book counts. Twenty years of seniority tells you how long someone has been making calls, not how many they got right.