Robert Townsend on Promises
Promises
Keep them. If asked when you can deliver something, ask for time to think. Build in a margin of safety. Name a date. Then deliver it earlier than you promised.
The world is divided into two classes of people: the few people who make good on their promises (even if they don’t promise as much), and the many who don’t. Get into Column A and stay there. You’ll be very valuable wherever you are.
You might suppose that the higher you go in the ranks of business executives, the more word-keepers you find. My experience doesn’t substantiate this.
– Robert Townsend in Up the Organization: How to stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits. 1970.
Townsend wrote this book shortly after leaving Avis, which he had converted from a nothing company to the prominent (and profitable) “We Try Harder” No. 2 to Hertz.
Most of his book focuses on the corporate world in which we suffer from or flee. The post above, though, points directly at us as frequent culprits. Adults with attention deficit disorder are very prone to a quick jump to “yes” — as a way to please others, and as a side-effect of our inability to gauge how long it takes to get things done (either the thing we say “yes” to or the other things we need to do, first). Townsend’s double-advice to us is to (a) break the habit and (b) be careful in trusting that our business partners have broken their habit.
In other posts, I’ll write more on the power of keeping promises (first to ourselves, and then to others). But for now, I’ll just point you to Amazon where you can buy a used copy of this out-of-print book from just $1.26: Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation From Stifling People and Strangling Profits
