The Acrobat Belongs on the Rope, the Fish in the Deep

This is a proverb that came up while I was talking with my children about a book they had been reading.

Looked at through the lens of modern management, it summarizes a fundamental rule of organizational effectiveness: put the right talent in the right position.

The line attributed to Albert Einstein confirms it: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

If you expect a fish to climb a tree, or an acrobat to be a strong swimmer, you waste the talent in question and you fail to reach your goal. In the same way, if you bury someone with high operational intelligence in desk-bound routine, or assign someone with strong strategic thinking to micro-management detail, you create the bottleneck in your business with your own hands.

At every level, one of the most critical tasks of a management team is to analyze each person's strengths and potential and give them “their own stage” — the place where they can deliver their highest performance.

This is exactly where the artistic side of management, which my esteemed teacher Nurullah Genç has always emphasized, comes to the fore. In a jigsaw puzzle, the whole only means something once every piece is in its right place.

The same is true of your company: only when every person is positioned in exactly the right place does the business arrive at that larger picture of success.