What is an executive? Is it someone who is important? Who gets more pay? Who has authority? Perhaps. But these are not the real reasons that such posts exist.

Most successful executives can personally do more work than other people: their output, quite usually, is very large. And though this is often necessary, that isn’t the reason either.

Let us take up the meaning of the word “executive.” It is derived from the word “executor” which means “a person who gets something done or produced.” The word comes from the Latin ex — completely + sequi — to follow, and means “to follow through to the end.” In other words, to get something DONE!

In any business or production organization, its prosperity depends upon GETTING THINGS DONE!

The executive is there to ensure that the people produce what they are supposed to produce and in viable quantity and with no overt products.

And that is why an executive is there and that is what he is supposed to do.

In these druggie days of supersocialism, people can get other ideas of why an executive is there. And, unfortunately, executives themselves can get other ideas of their role.It is an unfortunate fact, whether in a capitalism or a communism, that when an individual human being does not produce, he not only, in the short run or long run, cuts his own throat but he also drags the whole team down. A team or organization that does not produce not only loses its morale and pride, it also is committing eventual suicide.

The graveyards of history are full of “leisure classes” that did not produce: The peasants get real tired of seeing the aristocrats loaf and eventually cut off their heads. Modern times are crammed with beautiful experiments of “workers’ paradises” where everyone is starving to death.

One sees the TV commercials and reads the paperbacks and they tell him that his goal is expensively bought leisure and that the ideal is to lie beneath the palm trees and do no work. Whole ideologies get built around this beautiful dream of a world in which no single person ever lifts a finger and sighs away his days in loafing bliss.

Unfortunately, this does not align with the facts. The unhappiest little kids in the world are those who have nothing to do: They whine and mope and quarrel and are quite a burden to their mamas. People on relief or living on social security are the most miserable lot, morale-wise, one ever collided with: They will tell you they would rather have a job. The death rate of men who have retired is startling: Cast aside and feeling purposeless, no longer producing anything, they, as insurance companies will tell you, mostly pine away and die. In short, people who don’t produce are very unhappy people.

Union agitators, once upon a time, promised all the workers that in a few decades they would be in clover. Less work and more pay was the slogan. And where today is this dream? Failing to produce, union members are out there in their millions, unemployed! And this lack of production is making the cost of living so high that even if they did work, they would have trouble finding enough dollar bills to buy a hamburger.

A certain amount of lying in the sun is a good thing. A laborer should not be worked to death.

But all things are best in moderation. The “leisure class” goes to extremes of purposeless loafing, the working man produces far less than he’s paid for and in either case down comes the organization or the country.

A worker-oriented executive is trying to be liked by not requiring work from his organization: what is he actually accomplishing? He is lowering their living standards; he is pushing them into poverty; if he keeps on failing to persuade them to produce, he will kill them off. It categorizes as a suppressive act. “Go on, Joe, take the day off.” “Oh, you poor fellow, you shouldn’t work so hard.” “Who cares about the stats, let’s only work from eleven a.m. to noon.” “Are you all comfortable as you doze? Oh, that’s good, snore on.” Such a person is surely not an executive: he’s an imposter with a pistol leveled at the staffs’ head. For surely, surely it is HE who has them drawing such low pay and it is HE who will at last, through their tolerated indolence, get them fired. It is HE who will lose the org. That’s a pretty high price to pay for “being a good fellow.”

Holding a post on which he is entrusted to get things DONE, he is a traitor to his organization and to his staff.

Of course, there are penalties connected to getting people to produce. They are often green and unhatted and need somebody to show them where to put what when. They are often bewildered and don’t understand why these papers have to go in the right folders. And when one tries to get them to do some work, they sometimes snarl back or walk off and won’t play pool with one anymore.

But if one thinks that by taking it easy on staff he will make points, an executive is VERY mistaken. Usually such an executive is actually despised. Down deep the staff knows what he SHOULD be doing with them and if he, having the title, doesn’t do it, they see him as a fake.

It is interesting that staffs respect competent executives who get the job done. They respect the one that makes them work and they trust him.

It is a maxim that crews, staffs and employees respect only those in power who do their jobs and get them to do theirs. Oh, yes, they will elect people who tell them they don’t have to work. But it’s interesting that the first ones they blame when things go wrong are these worker-oriented softies: in the chaos of their wake, the next one people will support is a tough, strong one who knows his business.

The only executives that staffs and crews really respect are those who get them to produce and get the job done.

Look at Carter, the past unlamented president. Although he talked a lot about leadership, although he was the darling of the working man and all that, in office he was so wishy-washy, soft and incompetent — everybody’s pal — that they eventually threw him out with a landslide victory for his opponent, a very tough talking man who was actually anti-socialist.

However one tries to coat the pill, there is no substitute, in an executive, for the ability to get the crew to produce.

The fire-breathing product officer will be followed and supported when the wishy-washy old pal guy will be stepped all over in the rush to follow a real leader.

Across the world, looking at organizations, one can spot every company and org which has executives who do not get their crews to produce. Such areas loom up like danger flags of trouble. Although their executives might think they are being good fellows, loafingly cheered by all, the fact is that their crews, behind their backs, despise them, the public regards them with contempt and the upper management echelons look at those loafing stats and put the names of those executives in a little black book for soonest firing.

It is not hard to detect a happy, cheerful org: its stats are up. And it is not hard to detect executives who are NOT making their crews produce: there’s lots of conflict and trouble in the place and their stats are down.