PAPERmaking! g FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF PAPER TECHNOLOGY Volume 2, Number 1, 2016
Then, the other that we have to do is to recognise, select and train subordinate leaders. Now, an Army in which the only leaders are the Generals will never win any victories at all. You have to get leaders the whole way down and it is the same in industry. You have to spot them quite early because it is no good having a fellow in the ranks for fifteen years and then expecting him to become an officer - he won't. We have to have some organisation in industry, like you have in the Army, that begins to look for potential leaders as soon as they join. You know, when we had National Service in the Army, the boy came in and from the day he joined he was being looked at either as a potential N.C.O. or as a potential officer, because we only had him two years and we wanted to use the potential officers for eighteen months as officers, and we had jolly good officers that way. But I think very often in industry we are not quick enough to spot the fellow who could become a good executive. We know the qualities that we ought to look for but we haven't got a good system of looking for them or reporting them when we find them. But, to go even higher, I think when you want a senior executive, sometimes there isn't a very good method of selecting him. You see, in the Army, if I wanted a Divisional Commander, I would very likely pick one that I knew and he would, I hope, do a good job; but the military executive furnish and put on my desk four names with a little history of what they were and what they had done and they would say: "Any one of these four will do the job, but some of them have such and such faults and some of them have lack of qualifications, and so on." In industry, one is awfully inclined to miss a chap who has been working in another section of a large industry and go to the chap he knows very well. But I think we ought to have organisation which will put every man in front of whatever does the selection. We have, in industry, to a very large extent, copied the methods of training in the Army and I think that is very wise. We have our staff colleges and they are modelled completely on the ordinary Army life. They run the same way and their methods of instruction are the same and I think that is very good and it works very well. But there is one thing a good many industries are not totally good on and that is, having got a fellow who is likely to be a potential executive, very often his career is not planned; he is not given the wide experience that he should have. People are obviously reluctant: if you were the manager of a factory or a department and you have got a good chap under you, you are in no hurry to send him away. But, there should be some organisation which looks for a man in ten years' time to be one of our leading executives. He has the qualities and now he has spent all his time in one line. They will shift him over to another because he will need that when he gets up. I do not think we plan careers of our most promising chaps in industry as well as we should. Now, I have talked a good deal too much, but one of the things is that industry is changing - the world in changing, politically and materially, morally and in every way the world all around us is changing. But it is not changing like it used to fifty or sixty years ago when I was a boy. The world is changing now as if somebody had his foot down hard on the accelerator of a sports car and we have got to be alive to that. But, it is not good, and it is quite wrong to go about shaking one's head saying, "Oh, things are changing." Of course they are changing; anything that lives changes and the thing to remember is that change is only another name for opportunity. And why shouldn't it be our opportunity? THANKS OF THE MEETING were expressed by Mr. J. Palmer Kent, Q.C.
Page 8 of 8
Article 12 – Leadership (Field-Marshall Slim)
Made with FlippingBook Digital Publishing Software