To give you a clear idea of what this chapter is about, let us start off by reading the famous Old Testament story of King Solomon’s judgment1:
“Then two women who were harlots came to the king and stood before him. The one woman said, ‘Oh, my lord, this woman and I live in the same house; and I gave birth to a child while she was in the house. It happened on the third day after I gave birth, that this woman also gave birth to a child, and we were together. There was no stranger with us in the house, only the two of us in the house. This woman’s son died in the night, because she lay on it. “So she arose in the middle of the night and took my son from beside me while your maidservant slept, and laid him in her bosom, and laid her dead son in my bosom. When I rose in the morning to nurse my son, behold, he was dead; but when I looked at him carefully in the morning, behold, he was not my son, whom I had borne.’ Then the other woman said, ‘No! For the living one is my son, and the dead one is your son.’ But the first woman said, ‘No! For the dead one is your son, and the living one is my son.’ Thus they spoke before the king. Then the king said, ‘The one says, “This is my son who is living, and your son is the dead one”; and the other says, “No! For your son is the dead one, and my son is the living one.’” The king said, ‘Get me a sword.’ So they brought a sword before the king. The king said, ‘Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other.’ Then the woman whose child was the living one spoke to the king, for she was deeply stirred over her son and said, ‘Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means kill him.’ But the other said, ‘He shall be neither mine nor yours; divide him!’ Then the king said, ‘Give the first woman the living child, and by no means kill him. She is his mother.’ When all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had handed down, they feared the king, for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him to administer justice.”
As you and all managers know, (virtually) all decisions entail some degree of compromise. But do you nevertheless always start out by asking, “What would be right?” rather than merely, “What is acceptable?” Until you identify the right outcome, you will have no way of differentiating between a right and wrong compromise. And a surfeit of wrong compromises leads to what are commonly qualified in rather veiled terms as “circumstantial constraints.”
The old German proverb that, “Half a bread is better than no bread at all” is right insofar as bread is still food, making the choice of half a loaf the right kind of compromise. Not so the bluff by King Solomon. His deliberately absurd suggestion that the baby be cut in two would have been a clear example of the wrong kind of compromise because it would not have produced an acceptable minimum outcome: leaving at least one of the women with a living child.
Let us now return for a moment to Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Soon after Peter F. Drucker started his first big consulting assignment at General Motors to conduct a study on the company’s management structure and management policies, Sloan called Drucker into his office and said to him:
“I shall not tell you what to study, what to write, or what conclusions to come to. This is your task. My only instruction to you is to put down what you think is right as you see it. Don’t you worry about our reaction. Don’t you worry about whether we will like this or dislike that. And don’t you, above all, concern yourself with the compromises that might be needed to make your recommendations acceptable. There is not one executive in this company who does not know how to make every single conceivable compromise without any help from you. But he can’t make the right compromise unless you first tell him what ‘right’ is.”2
Managerial competence is reflected in the ability to distinguish between right and wrong compromises. A precondition for drawing such distinctions is the meticulous and unequivocal stipulation of a minimum acceptable outcome.
Think about a decision you need to make at the moment: what would be right?
The next time you have to make a key decision, scrupulously define the minimum acceptable outcome.