Gut Feeling

About half of the invincible executives with whom I discussed the issue claimed to have near clairvoyance in determining who will try to take advantage of them. "I can just tell by looking at them," or "I can tell after five minutes of speaking with them," was the variation on a theme I heard during my interviews. For example, Bruno Schmitter, the CEO of the successful Hydromat, Inc, a major international supplier of high-tech machining equipment, told me: "I break people down like machines. I determine quickly whether they are reliable and consistent. I can see behind people who are not genuine and who do not have themselves under control." An executive trainer with whom I worked in the retail business several years ago echoed that sentiment: "A top executive separates ambition from opportunism almost immediately. We like ambition; we detest opportunism, and we are very good at telling the difference between the two," he said. If you are going to be an executive with staying power, therefore, you must value ambition, destroy opportunism, and be adept at telling the difference between the two.

Surprisingly, a few of the top executives I interviewed stated to me that they feel women are better than men at judging opportunism. Top banker and baseball team owner Drew Baur, for example, said that when he needs a quick, reliable judgment on someone's intentions, he asks his top women advisers for their opinions. "Women are simply better judges of opportunism than men," according to Baur. "We have had at the bank a couple of misfits, and I would have to say that some of the women executives picked it up much faster than I did."

There is probably some truth to the notion that top managers display good intuition about the quality of other people. But I suspect that, more often than not, what is really going on is the rapid assimilation of a variety of more concrete indicators of people who will not be reliable. Here are some of the more specific qualities that invincible executives seek in deciding the people and companies with whom they will work.