You Have To Break A Few Eggs to Make An Omelet, or Executive Derailment is Inevitable

A popular myth is that executive turnover is inevitable. To make a great company you need to weed out the executive troublemakers, regardless of the value they bring to the company.

There is an old proverb that says you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. This means that in order to achieve something it is inevitable and necessary that something should be destroyed. Some credit New York Times Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter Walter Duranty with popularizing the phrase in describing Joseph Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. For the record, in Russian, the proverb is “when the wood is cut, the chips fly.”

So let the chips fly where they may. You can nickname this management style as churn, baby, churn. If the executive derails, then just get rid of them before it turns into a full blown train wreck.

This just doesn’t make economic sense, because companies today must compete to find, develop and retain top talent. Given the estimates that the costs of replacement of highly skilled workers and those in leadership roles can run up to 200 percent of the employees salary, the incentive for retaining talent is enourmous (Nowack, Envisa Learning White Paper, “Coaching Competent Jerks: Can Zebras Change Their Stripes?” 2006).