usually more interesting than answers. If you had to identify the most important person in your organisation, there is an obvious answer, a trite-and-untrue answer and a wrong-but-useful answer.
The trite answer to the same question is “the customer”. This is the kind of thing someone delivering atalk would say, after a suitably meaningful pause. It is the kind of thing that people in the audience would nod wisely at. An analysis of earnings-call transcripts of500 firms by Nandil Bhatia and Stephan Meier of Columbia Business School finds that executives talk about customers ten times more than they do about employees.
The third category of answer will almost certainly be wrong but it will be the product of an instructive thought process. Firms routinely identify their most talented people across departments, and offer retention bonuses to get them to stay. But they don’t usually ask what might qualify someone for the title of most important person in an organisation .
Your search might lead you to the cutting edge: an executive, programmer or researcher working on your most promising new product. It might also take you back in time. The vital employee might be someone who knows the technology equivalent of Sanskrit.