Success Quote by Harold S. Geneen

Geneen’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to every glossy dashboard that pretends management is just math. Performance can be counted: units shipped, revenue booked, costs cut. Nonperformance is a shadow balance sheet: the deals not pursued, the risks never taken, the customer complaints that died in voicemail, the mediocre meeting that consumed a morning and produced nothing. You can’t easily graph the opportunity cost of inertia, or the cumulative drag of “good enough.”

The intent is managerial and slightly prosecutorial. Geneen, the famously hard-nosed ITT chief, is pointing at the place where accountability typically goes to hide. Organizations excel at rewarding visible output and punishing visible failure, but they struggle to even notice absence: the missing initiative, the unchallenged assumption, the silent compliance. Nonperformance often masquerades as prudence. It looks like avoiding mistakes, keeping your head down, staying “aligned.” In corporate cultures built around not getting blamed, that invisibility becomes a career strategy.

The subtext is also about measurement as power. If you can’t measure nonperformance, you can’t assign it, price it, or manage it. That gap invites bureaucratic sprawl and comfortable underachievement: everyone appears busy, few are clearly failing, and yet the enterprise slowly loses edge. Geneen is warning that the most dangerous losses won’t show up as a red number; they’ll show up as nothing happening at all.

Contextually, it’s a mid-century executive worldview: control systems, reporting lines, and metrics as the nervous system of a giant conglomerate. The twist is his admission that the most important thing may be what those systems can’t see.