Alfred P. Sloan Jnr, who only joined General Motors in his late 40s, quickly became it’s CEO, and then turned it into easily the biggest and most successful industrial enterprise the world had ever known, quickly passing the Ford Motor company, which had been the early pioneer in the industry. How did he do it? According to Peter Drucker, the famous management writer, the secret to his success was the extraordinary amount of time and effort he spent in making the decisions as to who to appoint to it’s various management positions, leading Drucker to coin the incredibly important and famous saying that “The control of your business is your people decisions.”
Following this, we’ve come to believe that a saying that is equally incredibly important, perhaps more important for us as individuals, is that “The control of your life is your people decisions” – who you decide to deal with, who you decide to let into your life, which, of course, for us as individuals, includes the decisions about organisations. It applies to your decisions about who to get to carry out any surgery you need right down to deciding who you get to mow your lawns!
And the more we’ve thought about it, the more astonished we’ve become about how haphazard and careless we, the people, are about these decisions, all day every day, and about how haphazard and careless we have been as individuals, ourselves, in the past – hardly spending any time and effort at all in making them. To start off with, we can easily think of about 10 doctors we mistakenly let into our lives – and that’s just doctors!
Readers, we challenge you to think about how much better your life may have been now if you’d put more time and effort into making these decisions in the past.
And going with this, which we think is just as significant, is how modern technology has provided us with ways of helping us with making these decisions – to us, it’s incredibly likely that the people and organisations we send letters to and who provide the best responses will be the best for us to let into our lives, and, of course, modern means of communication, particularly ordinary emails, have made this so incredibly easy and efficient. In particular, we can be getting our information on health matters from the very best people in the world – even if they’re on the other side of the world.
Of course, this has application in thousands of situations, but further to our previous post on Ramsay Health Care, their response, if any, to the letter we’ve shown in it as being sent to it will, in our opinion, provide us with invaluable clues as to whether we should let any of it’s people into our lives. From past experience, perhaps not that many!
Email us at info@questionsmisc.info.