I want to share with you a conviction I have held for most of my professional life, sharpened by every year that has passed and every institution I have studied closely. It is a conviction I have stated before in various forms, and one I will state again because I do not believe we have absorbed its implications in this country with the seriousness it deserves.
Seventy to eighty per cent of any institution’s success is determined by selection. Not by strategy, not by funding, not by technology, but by selection.
Who is in the room? Who is given the work? Who is trusted with the decisions? Whether you are running a company, a ministry, a regulator, a development bank, a teaching hospital, a foundation or a country, the people you choose determine, more than anything else, what happens next.
This is not an opinion I have arrived at lightly. It is a conviction shaped by more than two decades of advising organisations on what makes them perform, by careful study of institutions that have succeeded and institutions that have failed, and by the patterns that emerge again and again in both. The institutions that perform are the ones that selected well. The institutions that fail are, with almost monotonous regularity, the ones that selected poorly. Everything else is downstream.
