Why Use RO: Advice to CEOs

Julian Fairfield It very much depends on the chief executive. If the chief executive actually is very comfortable with a conceptual approach to organization, and they actually they're looking for it, and they're looking for almost an A to Z model, then requisite organization is it the other ways of approaching organizing large corporations, which do work quite well, are not A to Z. They're a pastiche of different things. There is a lot of fashion, and I actually don't deride fashion. I think fashion is quite a good idea because it sort of is a refreshment. It forces you to look at things differently. We used to have a fashion in one of the companies I worked for of changing from a profit center to a cost center about every four years. It was wonderful. It made you actually sit up and say, oh, I've learned how to play the profit game. Now I better learn how to play the Cost game, or I better learn how to play the ROI game, or whatever. So I'm not against fashions. They're interesting. It is absolutely an issue of how the CEO sees the world, whether they have a need for conceptualization and some do and some don't, and actually most don't. I suspect it's a combination of this business of I like to have a lot of degrees of freedom, and I would love to be loved. I would love to have human relationships that were not contractual. This stuff is too cold and too harsh for me. It may have just like driving only on one side of the road, some ultimate benefit, but it's not how I want to be as a human being. I want to be accepted as a whole person, not as a contract to produce an outcome. That's probably my bottom line, is that we all want to be loved.