The View from Above

"To be promoted is to sit in a higher chair." That is what I believed when I was young. What actually rose was not the chair but the vantage point. From the president's office on the twelfth floor I cannot see the desks on each floor. Yet when I unfold the single map called an org chart, five departments lie spread out like a plain: sales, marketing, medical, legal, and materials review. In the first essay I wrote about the justice disease as seen from my own desk. Now, from above the map, I watch five kinds of justice fail to mesh with the one beside them.

The Height of the President's Chair

I once sat in one square of that map myself, the materials-review desk. Back then the friction with the next department loomed as large as a mountain. Seen now from above, that same friction flattens into a single line, like a contour. Height makes things look flat, and that flatness is the trap: the higher I go, the fainter the grinding noise that once filled the floor below.

On Monday mornings the weekly reports of five department heads lie side by side on my desk. Same company, same single week. Yet read together, they feel like reports from five different companies. Sales writes of a budget falling behind; materials review records seven pieces sent back that week. Over the very same promotional leaflet for the very same drug, one writes too slow and the other writes too rushed.

Each Department's Justice

Walk this map looking for a villain and you find none. There are only people trying to be right at their own posts. Let me set down the five justices, one by one.

Five Eyes on One Leaflet

Picture one actual sheet: the leaflet for a new oral anticoagulant. The headline reads, "Works firmly, while holding down bleeding risk." Five departments look at this single line, each with a different eye. The same one line carries five meanings.

All five are right. The sales deadline, the force of the marketing line, medical's caution, legal's wariness, materials review's red line — each is right as a piece of work. Five kinds of rightness lined up, and still they collide on a single sheet of paper. This was the view from the president's chair.

A Map Drawn Only with Good People

The map is drawn only with good people. That is the most troublesome thing the high vantage point taught me. With an enemy, the story is simple: give management a malice to defeat and it becomes a plain fight. But the real map holds no malice. What it holds is five kinds of goodwill, none willing to yield.

Tension is not something to resolve but something to control. To keep the thread strung between profit, growth, and control taut without snapping it. That was the substance of the work called management. ── after the argument of Robert Simons, Levers of Control

The job of the president's chair is not to crown one winner among five justices. It is to watch the tension of the threads so the map itself does not tear. Pull any one thread too hard and the paper rips: let sales alone win and the norms collapse; let materials review alone win and the business stops.

Even from above, no answer falls from the sky. What comes into view is the hardest scene to handle: that no one is wrong. A collision with no villain in it — that is what the justice disease really is. The materials-review desk where I once sat now looks small, just one square on the map. Because it looks small, I still feel in my palm the frustration of the days I sat in that chair. The next thing I will write about is that chair.