Organizations are like nectarines: sweet stuff on the outside, pit in the middle.
I’ll explain shortly. But first, some back story. Nobel-Prize-winning leadership expert Herbert Simon wrote about this simple truth in his book, Administrative Behavior. It forever changed the way I see leadership, organizations, and yes, nectarines.
Simon’s book blows the mind, as it should. Swedes don’t give Nobel Prizes to chumps. Whenever someone wins, we take notice. And when the prize is for leadership, anyone who wants to be a good leader should take special notice.
So I did. Problem is, reading Simon’s book is like eating Douglas fir. Deep thinkers are notorious for lousy lecturing and writing. Einstein once did a lecture series where two hundred showed for the first one but only ten for the second. Point is, great minds aren’t often great enough to boil ideas down to simplest functional form, then communicate in a clear and compelling way.
My challenge here is translating Simon into actionable language. Which brings me back to nectarines. Organizations are like nectarines: sweet stuff on the outside, pit in the middle.
The sweet stuff is the product or service someone wants, and the workers directly delivering that sweetness. Simon called these workers “operatives.” Operatives build the automobile, put out the fire, sell the groceries, drive the trucks. In sports, operatives are players who make the baskets, catch the footballs, throw the pitches. They work at the lowest levels in the hierarchy, on the outer edges of the organization. They give the goods to the world, just like the nectarine offers the sweet stuff on the outside.
Then there’s the pit, which in Simon’s terms is all the “non-operative” staff. This is everyone else in the organization except those directly delivering the sweet stuff, usually higher in the hierarchy, deeper in the organization. These “non-operatives” are the CEO, the line leader, the basketball coach, the administrative staff.
Effective leaders know the difference between the sweet stuff and the pit. And their goal is to maximize the sweet stuff, not grow the pit. Ineffective leaders, on the other hand, confuse pit and sweet.
Do you know what’s pit and sweet for your organization?
