Career Success Comes Down to "Great People Decisions"

CEOs love to say that great people make great organizations. Funny, then, that so many managers and others in a position to hire and promote know so very little about making great people decisions.

Notice I didn't call it the "art" of making great people decisions. As executive search consultant Claudio Fernandez Araoz writes in his new book, Great People Decisions--Why They Matter So Much, Why They Are So Hard, and How You Can Master Them, it's not an art but a skill--one that can be learned and mastered. Araoz, a slender and exuberant man, stopped by TIME's offices last week to explain.

Claudio Fernandez Araoz hobnobs with the likes of Jack Welch and concludes: great people decisions make the career. / Photo courtesy of EZI

Putting the right people in the right jobs can make or break a manager. Yet, in more than two decades of experience as an executive search consultant and over at least 400 talent hunts, it dawned on Araoz that while business concentrated on other key factors for success--sector, timing, customers, leadership--few had a system for selecting and grooming its workforce.

Araoz, who lives in Buenos Aires and is a partner in search firm Egon Zehnder International, begins the book by telling of the day long ago when he sat down for a job interview with Egon Zehnder himself. Young Araoz asked him: What makes a person successful? Zehnder answered, "Luck." A person's nationality, schooling, family, health, appearance, IQ--many of these things are beyond his control, yet may play an inordinate role in his career success.

Araoz agreed, but wasn't satisfied.

Why do certain people succeed, and others fail? I think I have an answer.

1. Genetics
2. Development
3. Career decisions
4. People decisions

The book goes on to explain the integral role people decisions make not just in organizational success but in individual career success--and even in personal happiness (we choose our spouses, friends and doctors, don't we?). Araoz writes in a fluid, energetic and highly readable style, citing gurus from Jack Welch (whom he's worked with on the G.E. CEO's own books and from whom he snagged a glowing endorsement) to Malcolm Gladwell. He's fond of wonky charts and graphs--during our meeting, he scribbled off three or four--but his writing is relatively free of MBA-speak.

Great People Decisions comes out June 1. Check it out, and let me know what you think.