Politics & Power Quote by Harold S. Geneen

Accountability is the missing verb in Geneen's sentence. Not vision, not talent, not even strategy. Just the blunt fact that in many companies, management failure isn’t punished, audited, or even clearly named, so it becomes the default setting. Geneen, the famously hard-nosed CEO of ITT, is speaking from a mid-century corporate world where sprawling conglomerates and insulated executive layers made it easy for underperformance to hide inside complexity. His line lands because it refuses the comforting idea that results are primarily about inspiration. He frames results as enforcement.

The specific intent is managerial: diagnose why goals die on the vine and prescribe a remedy. But the subtext is sharper. "Nobody makes them" indicts the whole governance ecosystem: boards that don’t challenge, shareholders that don’t scrutinize, peers who prefer collegiality to candor, and internal metrics designed to flatter rather than reveal. It also exposes a cultural preference in American corporate life for incentives over consequences, for hoping the bonus plan will do the policing that leaders are unwilling to do face-to-face.

Context matters: Geneen built a reputation on relentless measurement and frequent reviews, the opposite of the "trust the team" romance. Read now, the quote doubles as a warning about modern corporate theater: OKRs, dashboards, and all-hands meetings can simulate discipline while avoiding the uncomfortable moment when someone is actually held responsible. Geneen’s cynicism isn’t about human nature; it’s about systems that quietly permit drift.