While he had needed someone like Ed to help him run the
business, he had known that the board was right: the business
that had been in the family for three generations was on the
line, and they simply couldn’t turn it over to Ed. Baxter stayed
on and Ed stayed in place until another successor for Baxter was
found. Baxter then retired, and Ed resigned.
If this had been a movie, of course, Ed would have turned
into Jimmy Stewart by the last reel and gotten the job. But real
life doesn’t work like the movies, and heroes and villains aren’t
as easy to spot.
In fact, I don’t think Ed was either a hero or a villain. He was
a victim, a man who saw himself as self-made, but who in fact
had patterned himself after the wrong models in the wrong
corporate culture.
He came into the business world as a tough street kid, a boy
from the wrong side of the tracks who was determined to make
good. He was ambitious and industrious. But ultimately he was
just another product of the prevailing climate. Whatever char-
acter or vision he might have had atrophied along the way.
Ed might have learned to lead. Certainly, when he started
work in the factory, he had a passion for the promises of life. But
then he went through the looking glass into a dog-eat-dog world
where people were rewarded not for expressing themselves but
for proving themselves. In proving himself an ideal servant of
the system, Ed never fully deployed himself—he allowed himself
to be deployed by his employer. Himself driven, he drove others,
becoming the pluperfect boss. He couldn’t adjust to a new cor-
porate climate where vision and character were important.
When I sorted it out afterward, I realized that there were ac-
tually five things that the board was interested in: technical
competence (which Ed had), people skills, conceptual skills
Mastering the Context