Monday morning, a single piece of promotional material sits on the desk in the president's office. It is a detail aid (the document an MR shows to physicians) for an antihypertensive drug, sent up by the Sales Promotion department as the centerpiece of next term's campaign. A small sticky note in the lower right corner of the cover is scrawled, "Projected quarterly sales: 1.8 billion yen." Before my eyes fall on that line, they stop on page three, on the footnote beneath the efficacy graph. It is the exact spot where, twelve years ago, at the materials-review desk, I put my red pen to the same kind of figure. The reviewer's eye has not faded. The president's eye is already reading the 1.8 billion beside it. On one and the same document, two ways of seeing overlap. This series begins from that overlap.
One Document, Two Eyes
When I was a materials reviewer, I saw this single page only through one question: is it proper or not. Does it stay within the approved indication? Does it blow up the relative risk reduction while shrinking and hiding the absolute difference? Are the footnote characters sized out of proportion to the body text? There were three red pens in my desk drawer, and on average I marked seven points on each piece of material. Stopping things was my job; that no one praised me for what I stopped was my pride.
Now I read that same document with another eye as well. This one page carries 1.8 billion yen in a quarter. Four hundred MRs will carry it to cardiology departments across the country. Spend two weeks on revisions, and the campaign's first wave is delayed two weeks, and a delayed first wave shows up directly in the numbers. The executive's eye, before asking whether it is proper, asks whether it will reach. The two eyes are each correct. And each one hurries the other.
| Point | The Reviewer's Eye | The Executive's Eye |
|---|---|---|
| Efficacy graph | Is the absolute difference omitted in a way that misleads? | Is it a persuasive page a physician will remember? |
| Footnote on page three | Does it exceed the indication by even one word? | Does it read as a point of differentiation against rivals? |
| Days needed for revision | Two weeks. Propriety takes priority over the deadline. | Two weeks. A day's delay is a day's delay in sales. |
| The greatest risk | Administrative guidance, voluntary recall, loss of corporate trust | Opportunity loss—the cost of what was never sent out. |
The Height of the Chair
Promotion is not the accumulation of titles; it is the rising of the place from which you see. The president's chair is higher than the desk, and the desk is higher than each department. The higher you go, the smaller a single piece of material looks, and the larger the figures lined up beside it appear. I now look down on four departments at once. "Look down" sounds arrogant, but in truth the view of every department reaches my chair slightly distorted. Each department holds its own justice. And that justice is, more often than not, correct.
Sales Promotion
Their justice lies in speed. "If it arrives a day sooner, there is a patient whose blood pressure goes uncontrolled today." They themselves believe their numbers are a proxy for human lives. So to the field, two weeks of review look like two weeks of inaction.
Marketing
Their justice lies in getting through. "A correctness that does not land is the same as one that does not exist." They design story and differentiation. They do not want to shrink the footnote; they only want to hold the lead message in a physician's memory one second longer.
Medical Affairs
Their justice lies in honesty. "Never take a single step beyond what the data can say." They play the role of pouring cold water on marketing's heat, and are not easily liked inside the company. But without them, the efficacy graph quietly becomes a picture of a drug that works too well.
Materials Review & Governance
Their justice lies in stopping. "There are things you can protect only by stopping them." The company's credibility, the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Act, the patient's correct understanding. They go unpraised. Material sent out becomes someone's achievement; material stopped stays in no one's memory. That was once my chair.
None of the four justices is a lie. And the ones that are no lie are the hardest to handle once they curdle. That is why the height of the chair cannot decide between them. The very framing of the question—which ranks higher, the justice of speed or the justice of stopping—is wrong from the start. What I decide is not a ranking but the stance that keeps all four standing at once. That was the first thing I understood from this chair.
The Chair That Was Once Mine
The Materials Review and Governance room is two floors below the president's office. Once a month I go down there. The current department head, M (my successor two generations on), is teaching young reviewers how to read a figure in a meeting room piled with pending cases. Several items on the checklist he uses are ones I made twelve years ago. The format has been renewed, but the skeleton is unchanged. Watching the habit of my own hand carried on by someone else's hand brings a strange déjà vu.
"President, this one—we ought to stop it. But if we stop it, they tell me next term's numbers won't hold." Saying this, M placed the antihypertensive material in front of me. The line I wanted to say to my own boss twelve years ago, and could not, he is now saying to me. ── M, Head of Materials Review & Governance
The frustration comes doubled. One is that I can grasp his frustration as if it were in my own hand: that feeling when the grounds to stop are all assembled, yet the weight of the authority to stop does not match them. The other is my own frustration. The me of today cannot lightly tell him either "stop it" or "pass it." A word from the president crushes the department's judgment from above. What I want to protect is the strength for him to declare "stop" from his own chair—not my single commanding voice. The more I want to protect something, the less I can speak into it.
Serving Two Masters
The president serves two masters. One is Management—the master of figures: sales, profit, growth. The other is Compliance—the master of norms: standards, ethics, propriety. The old saying holds that one cannot serve two masters; the one to whom you give your loyalty must be a single lord. But the chair of a pharmaceutical company's president is precisely the place that takes on that impossibility as its duty. The moment it chooses one side, this chair breaks.
Not Choosing, but Keeping Both Standing
Reconciliation is not adding the two and dividing by two. There is no compromise point of 0.9 billion yen lying halfway between 1.8 billion and propriety. There is no solution that shrinks the footnote only by half. To reconcile is to admit that the two masters speak different languages, and to keep translating between them. Management says "opportunity loss"; compliance says "risk of administrative guidance." On one and the same piece of material, they price it in different currencies. My job is to set the exchange rate between those two currencies, case by case, and to leave the grounds for it in writing.
On willpower alone, this chair would not hold for a single day. "We value both" is a beautiful phrase, but at next term's budget meeting it carries not one yen of force. What is needed is not a stance but a structure. Who holds the authority to stop? When they stop something, do they suffer for it? Is there an institutional place where the language of management and the language of compliance are set side by side on the same meeting table? What I want to write in this series is not a way to erase the conflict. It is the design of governance that keeps the conflict alive, yet does not topple the company.
The Justice Disease IV ── Serving Two Masters ── Map of all 10 episodes
- Vol. 1 (this one): The President's Chair
- Vol. 2: The View from Above
- Vol. 3: The One in My Old Chair
- Vol. 4: Two Masters
- Vol. 5: Half the Picture
- Vol. 6: When Business Logic Swallows Review
- Vol. 7: Designing for "No"
- Vol. 8: Bringing the Unmeasurable into the Boardroom
- Vol. 9: The Machinery of Both
- Vol. 10 (finale): The Everyday Peace of One Who Serves Two Masters
The single piece of material placed on my desk Monday morning is still there in the evening. Should I put the red pen to it, or sign off on the 1.8 billion? The me of twelve years ago would have reached for the red pen without hesitation. The head of Sales Promotion would have pointed at the figure on the sticky note without hesitation. The me in the president's chair is neither. I called M in, and that same day I set down in writing one condition of authority and deadline, so that he could stop it by his own judgment. The material itself I returned to his desk. What I must decide, it dawns on me, is not the yes-or-no of one piece of material, but the structure by which, each time such a piece arrives, the two eyes can sit at the same desk. All four justices are correct. Where does something correct turn into a sickness that binds people?—this is the one point I will follow, episode by episode, from here. Reconciliation cannot be held by spirit. It can be held only by design. From here, I draw that blueprint one sheet at a time. This is how the daily ordinary begins.
- Promotion changes not your title but the height of your vantage. The same material appears at once as propriety to the reviewer and as 1.8 billion yen to the executive.
- Sales, Marketing, Medical, and Materials Review each hold a correct justice, and the height of the chair cannot rank them—where a correct justice turns into a sickness is the question of this series.
- Looking at the review chair I once occupied, what I feel is déjà vu toward my successor M and the frustration of being unable to speak lightly into it.
- Management and compliance price the same material in different currencies. The president's job is to set the exchange rate between them and leave the grounds on record.
- Reconciliation cannot be held by willpower—only by designing authority, deadlines, and institutional venues. That blueprint is what this series sets out to draw.
- Robert Simons, Levers of Control (Harvard Business School Press, 1995) (The distinction between boundary systems (drawing the line of what must not be done) and diagnostic versus interactive control. The basis for designing the authority to stop and the management of numbers as separate levers.)
- Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford University Press, 1997) (The role verification and review play in organizations, and the danger of their ritualization. A guideline for thinking about what the reviewer's eye protects and what it may overlook.)
- Michael L. Tushman & Charles A. O'Reilly III, "Ambidextrous Organizations" (California Management Review, 1996) (Organizational ambidexterity—the capacity to hold two conflicting demands, exploration and exploitation, at once. A frame for reading the theme of serving two masters as a structure of reconciliation rather than choice.)