Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will

I can still vividly remember the week I was "fired" from this project in 1990. It was a frustrating project, all round, I think. Doubleday editor Harriet Rubin had hooked me up with Noel Tichy at the University of Michigan -- still one of the brightest and most fascinating management consultants I have ever met. Noel was the first management consultant I had spent a great deal of time with who had undergone the perennial problem of management consultants: being stretched so thin that reflection was difficult. And yet he was an extremely gifted individual who juggled a burgeoning consulting practice with managing an academic research institute and editing a magazine.

And writing a book. Like many people in such situations, he had gradually adopted a manic intensity and speed. Working with him was like being a small rowboat in the wake of a yacht throttled at full speed. I didn't know that his marriage was unravelling at the time, but I could see the ramifications; the yacht seemed to list from side to side...

Having spent two years at General Electric running Crotonville for Jack Welch, Noel had a very powerful subject, and a laudable model: Peter Drucker had spent two years at General Motors research his first major management book, Concept of the Corporation. But Noel didn't have one of Drucker's resources -- an in-depth body of observations and direct interviews. He had talked to Welch, and he had strong opinions about each of the senior managers at GE, but you could not get a sense of the texture of the organization from him. And Harriet demanded that kind of texture from the project.

I suggested going to GE myself and interviewing the people who had been involved in the process, but Noel -- for whatever reason -- resisted this. Having met some people at GE since then, I suspect that there was already a tension brewing between GE people and him... which would have made sending another individual difficult. Or perhaps he didn't trust me to handle the job. I never asked.

Finally, after a series of drafts and the prospect of an endless series of more drafts, I wrote a note to Noel spelling out the problem. Had I known then what I know now, I would have written the memo much sooner. It was not a very flattering memo, but it was flavored -- textured -- with the respect I felt and still feel for Noel. He is an extremely difficult individual, but innately gracious in his own way, and probably the most incisive management thinker/practitioner I have met. He is particularly gifted at seeing the future of management change endeavors -- he saw how prominent Welch would become long before most others saw it, and he also sees the future success or failure of other management initiatives. He may be legendary for alienating people (such as human resource people) who work for the companies he consults with, but his blind spots are a natural response to his own theory about management.

Within a week after I wrote the memo, I learned that Noel had arranged for Fortune reporter Stratford Sherman to be a coauthor on Control Your Destiny. Now, at last, much of the texture the book needed. Much of the language I developed with Noel is still in the final draft. It's actually a terrific book -- one of the few great glimpses into the real workings of a significant corporation undergoing significant change. I learned a great deal working on it.   Thanks, Noel.