Relevance of Requisite Organization Concepts for Members of Vistage

Speaker A One of my members, who is Art Man, brought Elliot Jack's ideas to us 15 years ago. He was a member of my group. He thought this was very important and he's very persuasive about it and suggested that we get more familiar with it. And way back when we got Alie Jack's book Requisite Organization, we read it and we discussed it at our meetings and tried to learn more about it. Then gradually, over time, did more and more with the subject of requisite organization by having speakers. Over the time period, I've had five different speakers come to my groups, and we've read another book by Elliot Jackson, which is Social Power, and the CEO discussed that. I felt that was a lot easier to understand than Requisite Organization, for me anyway, and then actually called up Elliot and talked to him and he said, Where are you? And I said, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And he said, oh, yes, Art man. I talked to him monthly or every other month. So I was very impressed with that. And I asked him if he would come talk to us, and he said he would like to, but at that moment he had to go fix some government. I forget where it was. And he was on a several month project. Then when he got back, we talked yet a second time, and he said that he was not totally recovered from something that he contracted on his job while he was away. And the next thing you know and this was in about 2003, I think that's the year he died. And that was all of that. And lo and behold, Ken Shepherd and some other people got together and thought that my impression is thought that they could put together some literature about Elliot that was easier to understand than what he wrote himself. And they wrote this first of a series of books that they're preparing to write. The first book is organization, Design, levels of Work and human capability. The series editor is my now friend Ken Shepard, and we have found the book considerably easier to read. Actually, what happened was Art Man went to the Global Organization Design Society conference last June in Canada, and I think he might even have been on a panel. He brought back several boxes of this book. He contacted me and said, you really need to take a look at this book. So I bought a box of the books from him after looking at it and made it available to some of my members. And they felt, as I did, that it was definitely something that we should be pursuing. So I proceeded to buy six more boxes of books and sold them to my members for my cost. And then we started a program of learning based on reading a part of the book and then discussing it at the meeting, then reading another part and discussing at the meeting. We have eight speakers a year in Vistage, and the other four meetings are called business Review meetings. So at the business review meetings before this, I had assigned a book a quarter. So we've been doing this for years, and I just decided that, well, this book is going to take longer than one reading and one quarter. So we're just proceeding quarter by quarter to read a part after another part. But the conclusion of whatever it was that caught my eye was that one of the biggest problems that my members have, they have to remember that these people are company owner managers, and they all eventually get to the point where they want to do something with their business after me. What in my business? Succession. What does that look like? Sell the business, whatever. This whole model of business management as a way for my members to come up with a succession strategy for themselves. And I consider this as the most helpful thing I could do for my members to get them on the track of and Elliot Jackson is the lead right through that process, I think. Sam.