Success Quote by Harold S. Geneen

Geneen is puncturing the comforting fantasy that information, once written down, becomes objective. In a corporate setting, paper is often treated like a sacrament: reports, forecasts, dashboards, minutes. They look clean, they travel well, they let leaders pretend they are managing reality instead of managing interpretations. Geneen’s line reminds you that documents don’t generate facts; people do. Paper is merely the last stop in a chain of incentives, fears, and self-protection.

The intent is managerial, almost prosecutorial: don’t let a memo outrank a witness. In big organizations, the most dangerous errors aren’t arithmetic; they’re social. Bad news gets sanded down. Metrics get “massaged” to match expectations. Forecasts become performative optimism because nobody wants to be the person who “doesn’t believe.” By shifting the emphasis from the data to the data’s source, Geneen is advocating a kind of executive literacy: read the numbers, then read the room.

The subtext is about power and accountability. “Reliability” isn’t just honesty; it’s whether the person can afford to be honest. If your culture punishes candor, your paperwork will be immaculate and useless. Geneen built his reputation at ITT during the mid-century rise of conglomerates, when sprawling hierarchies made it easy for reality to get lost in layers of reporting. The quote is a warning against bureaucratic ventriloquism: paper talks, but someone is always throwing their voice.