David Maister - Basic Ideas

Basic Ideas

• The major themes that emerge from over 30 years of Maister’s work are that the keys to success, for individuals and for institutions are “passion, people and principles."

• Maister points out that, in business, as in personal life, we all know what we should be doing, why we should be doing it, and often, how to do it. However, knowing all this is insufficient to predict whether individuals or institutions will, in fact, do it. Maister concludes that the only competitive advantage, for corporations and for careers, is the ability to create and transfer drive, determination, energy, excitement and enthusiasm.

• Maister demonstrated statistically a clear path to profits: if (and only if) skilled managers know how to energize their people, then (and only then) employees will serve the customers (or clients) with excellence, and the clientele will reward the organization with superior financial performance. Others had discussed these links before (e.g., The Service Profit Chain by James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, and Leonard A. Schlesinger, and more recently Grow Your Service Firm by Robert Craven) but Maister provided formal evidence and unveiled the critical elements of personal managerial influence, rather than formal management systems such as strategies, policies, reward systems and the like.

• A constant theme through Maister’s work is that individuals and organizations cannot excel in their performance unless they are prepared to act in accordance with an agreed set of principles, values and ideologies. He called this “Values in Action:” the willingness to be accountable for progress toward goals, and to accept consequences for non-compliance.

• Another constant theme in Maister’s work is that everything ultimately comes down to understanding how people work. His philosophy is that everything we want in life - whether it be profits, respect, fame, loyal subordinates, cooperative colleagues or, in our personal lives, love and relationships – all these things, each and every one of them, has to be given to us by another human being. That means we must know how to earn and deserve what we want the other person to give us back, and that means becoming good at relationships in everything we do.