How to Look at People
On the twenty-third of July 1983, in the centre of Palermo, the Mafia blew up the car of the senior magistrate Rocco Chinnici, Falcone’s chief. Chinnici himself was killed, along with two bodyguards and the concierge of his building. A policeman who wished to remain anonymous told a newspaper that there were thousands of mafiosi and only a few hundred of them.
In Florence the news reached Antonino Caponnetto, a quiet, shy magistrate, Sicilian by birth, who bred canaries and was due to retire soon. He applied for a transfer to the dead man’s post. He explained later that it was an impulse inspired by a sense of duty, and that the Sicilian in him had spoken up as well. When he walked into his new office in the Palace of Justice, he found a telegram on his desk wishing him success. Between the lines, Dickie writes, the message was plain: get ready to die. For the next four and a half years Caponnetto lived in a tiny room in a carabinieri barracks.
And straight after taking up the post he did something nobody had done before him. He gathered the magistrates who had experience fighting the Mafia (Falcone, Borsellino and two others) and built a team in which everyone shared information with everyone else. He took the idea from the fight against left-wing terrorism, and its whole point came down to one thing: if anyone else was killed, his knowledge would not die with him.
On the twenty-ninth of September 1984 Caponnetto called a press conference and announced that Tommaso Buscetta had agreed to cooperate with the investigation and that three hundred and sixty-six arrest warrants had been issued. Many of the accused had long been in hiding, and even so, Dickie writes, the Palermo police simply didn’t have enough handcuffs to take everyone in at once.
A quiet canary fancier did what no hero before him had managed: he organised the work.
People Grow into What’s Expected of Them
This is the last essay about people, and I want to begin with the most important thing. People become what you see in them. Not always and not entirely, but far more often than it seems. If you expect a lot of a man and show him you do, he stretches. If you think he’s mediocre, in time he stops trying to prove otherwise.
You remember Sonny Black telling Donnie he believed in him. Donnie really did turn out to be the best of everyone Sonny knew; he just wasn’t working for Sonny. The irony is bitter, but the mechanism is sound.
Don Vincenzo had a presser, Anna, who came to us as a young girl, spoke badly and was afraid of the clients. One day, when the counter girl fell ill, the Don put Anna on the front counter. Everyone gasped. So did Anna. The Don told her in front of everyone: “You know our linen better than anybody. You’ll manage.” She managed. Ten years later she was running our second laundry. The Don told me afterwards that he hadn’t known whether she’d manage. He knew something else: if he didn’t believe in her, she certainly wouldn’t.
We Judge Others Harder Than Ourselves
The second thing you need to know when you look at people. When something goes wrong for someone else, we put it down to his character: lazy, stupid, dishonest. When the same thing goes wrong for us, we put it down to circumstances: there wasn’t time, someone let us down, that’s how it turned out. It’s one of the oldest mistakes the human head makes.
Remember the Palermo taxi drivers whose radio-taxi service fell apart? If one of the drivers got lucky and picked up a couple of extra calls, the others decided almost automatically that he was cheating. In Sicily, according to Gambetta, nothing is more suspicious than luck. Nobody thought the man had simply been lucky. Everyone thought that was the kind of man he was.
We had a driver who was late with the morning delivery three weeks running. Everyone in the laundry decided he’d got lazy, and somebody swore he was moonlighting on the side. I was ready to have a stern word with him when the Don asked: “Have you asked him why?” It turned out the bridge on his route had been closed for repairs, and the detour added forty minutes. Nobody asked; everybody decided. The Don moved the start of his shift half an hour earlier, and the lateness stopped.
Before you decide a man is bad, ask yourself: what in his circumstances could have made me do the same? And ask him. More often than not the answer is simpler than you thought, and harder on your shrewdness.
Keep a Way Out
The third thing: smart people always keep several options in their heads. Not just how everything ought to go, but what to do if it goes otherwise.
During the Mafia war of the early eighties the construction firm Cassina was in a joint venture with the contractor Ignazio Lo Presti, who had Inzerillo’s protection. When Bontate and Inzerillo were killed, Cassina reacted quickly: it dissolved the partnership with Lo Presti and set up a new one with a firm from Bagheria close to the winners. Lo Presti, Gambetta writes, was slower to find a new protector, and in 1982 he disappeared.
At the same time another contractor, Silvio Faldetta, ran into similar trouble: his former protector vanished, and people started phoning him demanding fifty million. He stopped work on the site, reached Pippo Calò himself through Calò’s sister, and a month later Calò allowed the work to go on. The judges later established that Faldetta had known Calò since at least 1980, long before these events. That, Gambetta observes, may explain why he found a new protector relatively easily.
See the difference. Faldetta had a way out, laid down in advance. Lo Presti didn’t. I’m not asking you to look for protectors in those circles. I’m asking you to keep options in your head: another supplier, another client, another person who can do the job if this one can’t. A way out laid down in quiet times comes cheap. One you go looking for in a panic can cost you everything.
To Manage Is to Build, Not to Play the Hero
And the last thing, the point this whole chapter has been leading up to. Managing people doesn’t mean being the strongest, the cleverest or the bravest man in the room. It means arranging the work so that it runs even when you’re not there, and so that losing any one person, you included, doesn’t stop the business.
Caponnetto wasn’t a hero in the sense that Falcone and Borsellino were heroes. He was a quiet man with canaries. But he understood what nobody before him had: in a war where people are killed one after another, you can’t keep the knowledge in one head. He built a team in which everyone had the knowledge. And when Falcone and Borsellino were killed eight years later, their work didn’t die with them: the knowledge stayed with others, the trials went on, the verdicts stood.
In the office nobody gets killed, but people leave, fall ill, move away. If everything rests on one indispensable man, the business is fragile. Build teams so that every important piece of knowledge is held by at least two people. Share information. Teach people to do each other’s jobs. And don’t take pride in nothing working without you. That isn’t a compliment to you. It’s unfinished work.
The Bottom Line
Build the business so that it outlives anyone, you included. Caponnetto proved you don’t need to be a hero for that. You need to breed canaries, live in a barracks and organise the work. And, if possible, lay in a stock of handcuffs ahead of time.