“When you are beginning to think you’re so important, make a fist and stick your arm into a bucket of water up to your wrist. When you take it out, the hole you left is the measure of how much you’ll be missed.” - General Matthew Ridgeway General Matthew Ridgeway commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II, he later succeeded General MacArthur commanding UN Forces during the Korean War, and still later served as the Army Chief of Staff. In this quote, I believe he wanted to remind us that all of us are replaceable. The nature of things is that when we leave our organizations, they will inevitably close ranks and keep going forward, seemingly as if we were never there at all. Come Monday, someone new will occupy “your” chair. As an aside, thoughtful leaders should have trained those left behind to not only keep going but surpass what they have done; that’s part of our job as leaders: to develop the next generation to keep nudging the organization forward. Surprisingly, the higher up the food chain in the corporation we go, the seemingly the easier we are to replace. Sure, they may speak your name in hushed tones around the coffee pot or water cooler but for the most part, it is a matter of “out of sight, out of mind.” In terms of organization succession planning, that’s exactly the way it should be, the gears keep turning and the machine keeps grinding. I reference this quote often when I speak to law enforcement and military audiences about the importance of work/life integration. All of us have a professional expiration date. We need to prepare both our organizations and ourselves for the day when we’re that hole in a bucket of water.
Nice piece George!