A message to my successor.

• Author: Byrom, Fletcher L.
• Position: Tips from a CEO

Parting advice, in the form of nine commandments, on what a new CEO needs to know.

The most important commandment of all - 'Hang Loose.'

My name is Fletcher Byrom. I am 50 years old and I am the chief executive officer of one of America's 200 largest corporations. So far as I know, I am in full possession of all my faculties. My doctor and my insurance counselor tell me I am in good physical condition. I think I can outhustle, outtalk, and outwork anybody in this room.

Despite this, today I am thinking about the man who will be my successor. Not because anyone is pushing - not because I am getting any urgent internal alarms - but because I believe every chief executive, from the minute he moves into the big upstairs office, ought to be thinking about the fellow who will someday take his place.

I won't pretend I don't know who the next boss at Koppers might be. But life is full of surprises. The man who succeeds me might be one of the almost 1,400 people in our Pittsburgh headquarters. He might come from one of our 174 other locations. We have even been known to go outside of our own organization, and the next chief at Koppers could conceivably be someone in this room. So, please listen carefully, whoever you are out there.

You may be perfectly satisfied with the job you have now, but just to humor me, I want you to imagine that you have been tapped by our board of directors. You are sitting in the padded swivel chair in what used to be my office. I have dropped in to deliver my valedictory, which you are going to get whether you want it or not. It goes something like this:

Charley, I would say- if you can imagine that you are president of Koppers, you can imagine that your name is Charley - I would say, Charley, you are coming into this job at a most interesting time. You're taking charge of a company that has more than 125 major product lines, which it sells into 34 major industrial and consumer market classifications. So far in this decade, our sales of Koppers manufactured products have increased at an average rate of 10% per year. I'll tell you later why you have to maintain that rate of growth.

You're taking over at a time when technology will give you more information than ever on which to base your judgments. That doesn't mean the job is going to be any easier. The fundamental assignment is the same as it has been ever since corporations were invented. You have to determine the mission of the organization. You have to take certain abstractions and make sure they get translated into measurable objectives. You have to lay out an organization that can accomplish those objectives. You have to set up a sensing system that tells you whether you really are making progress. In short, Charley, this trip calls for a road map, an engine, and a compass - something to tell you where you're going, something to propel you there, and something to tell you whether you're on course.

I have to admit that some things have changed since I became president of Koppers at the age of 42. In recent years, I found more and more that the number of major decisions I could make was limited, so that my function became one of leadership of people rather than management of events. There was a generation gap building in the company, and I found myself with more insulation than I wanted, found myself sitting more often in the cynic's seat.

Maybe you can change that, but don't count on it. This office can be the loneliest place in the company, if only because there can't be more than one man at the top. You're it. Some things can and should be decided only by you - and later explained only by you to the board of directors. That's a heady experience, as you will discover.

You probably think I've come in here to give you some parting advice - and since you've listened this far without kicking me out, I'm not going to disappoint you.

Whatever else I think of myself, I've never pretended to be God, so I'll limit myself to nine commandments:

1. Hang loose. That's the most important commandment of all, and I'll explain it later.

2. Listen for the winds of change.

3. Increase the number of interfaces. That, too, will be explained.

4. Keep your intuition well lubricated, but...

5. Make sure you know where the information is buried.

6. Use growth as a means of getting and keeping good people, and use those people as a means of achieving continued growth. The two are interdependent.

7. Avoid like the plague those specialists who are only specialists.

8. Set your priorities in terms of the probable, rather than the merely possible, but...

9. Make sure you generate a reasonable number of mistakes. That's right - make sure you generate a reasonable number of mistakes.

First Commandment

Let's back up to the beginning. First Commandment: Hang Loose. The German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) once wrote, "There can be no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the wish to determine its outcome at too early a stage." I can paraphrase that as follows: "There can be no greater impediment to progress in business than the wish to determine its outcome by means of obscure symbols printed on paper." Experience has taught me that formalized organization charts tell you more about what you can't do than about what you can do. Too often, those neat little boxes serve to identify functional islands, with no way to get from one to the other except up the narrow lines to the top, along the wings and back down to the bottom. It's a wasteful way to travel.

I can give you an example right out of our own history. About a quarter of a century ago, Koppers was a loose federation of independent bodies floating around without much relation to each other. Brehon Somervell, an Army general with 32 years of outstanding service behind him, was brought in to pull the pieces together. He did a brilliant job of organization - in some ways, too brilliant.

Some of us back there in the 1940s foresaw fantastic opportunities in phthalic anhydride, which is used to make such products as paints, plasticizers, resins, dyes, insect repellents, and pharmaceuticals. I was in the Coal Tar Division then, and we were eager to move ahead, but the charter General Somervell had given us said that all we could do was to extract and refine chemicals - nothing else. We went to the Chemical Division, which had responsibility for all chemical synthesis and upgraded derivatives, and they said they didn't have the time or the money to fool with it. They had too many other things to do.

We finally got the rules changed. Recently, a trade magazine predicted that Koppers will produce about 25% of America's phthalic anhydride by the middle of 1970. We should have been No. 1 a long time ago, because we have been for many years the largest producer of the raw material from which phthalic anhydride is made. And the reason we haven't reached that No. 1 spot yet is that we lost 10 years because of a piece of paper that told us too much about what we couldn't do. The people who gave us that piece of paper would be furious if a waiter told them he couldn't bring them menus because they weren't at his table. The important thing in a restaurant is to get the menu to the customer, and never mind whose table it is. The important thing in a corporation is to seize an opportunity, and never mind whose responsibility it is.

Hang loose, Charley...