A Management Failure—At The Top
11/07/2005
Paul Munnis
As the Bush government continues to crash and burn we look to the root causes. We have spoken about the neo-con distain for the doctrine of Separation of Powers, their desire to undermine and ultimately change the U.S. Constitution to eliminate separation of Church and State, and now we will focus on their problems with managerial style.
In a very small business, top down management works good. The owner is rubbing elbows with the hired help all day long and they come to know one another and each others ways. The boss sets the goals and he can see which employees are contributing to meeting his stated goals and he can dump the losers. The business usually prospers. As it does it also grows and at some point the boss must delegate and thus slowely looses touch with the workers.
A successful businessman at this point will have altered the management style from top down to one that uses hired managers and supervisors to provide worker oversight and the top management concentrates on setting goals and issuing management directives and implementing a measurement system to achieve the goals.
As the company becomes large enough to issue stock they now are forced onto the measured mile of economic performance. If the CEO fails to advance the financial interests of the stockholders then he will be fired and replaced. The management emphasis shifts to an economic focus of return on investment.
Workers can easily become faceless and viewed as inhibitors to reaching some middle managers internal goals. There is also danger of workers being seen as overhead that drags financial performance. When that happens the company is headed for a tail-spin that often results in corporate failure. Outsourcing is one manifestation of this problem.
The Bush Administration is trying to run one of the largest businesses in the World, the U.S. Government, in a top down manner with all controls coming from the White House and directed by the Administration Principals Committee.
The proven management methods of delegation and oversight are waived out of fear that the Administration will not be able to nimbly exercise its power.
The result is that the Administration is failing to manage well and is thus loosing power. The organization has become bureaucratic, subject to micro management by remote managers seen as stooges and thus few if any goals are met except when muscled through legislatively. Such muscling breeds resentment. This is evident especially when it comes to observing management of the Iraqi War.
To start with, the political closet is full of skeletons that must be protected where the Iraq War is concerned. Failure to do so could cause forced resignation of the top managers. Protecting those skeletons has become more important than conducting the War so as to win it and thus to come out with successes. In fact, there are no clearly stated goals. We cannot state crisply why we are in Iraq or what our strategic goals are in occupying it. We have no measurements for the War effort and those that we do have are subject to change at the whim of a bureaucrat. Iraqi pacification fails because of Washington micro management and confused goals.
It’s the same everywhere that you look in the Bush Administration ranging from FEMA to Homeland Security. It extends to the management of our military and government agencies even like NASA. We see failure, grid-lock, incompetence, and huge amounts of money being wasted. We do not see a record of solid accomplishment in terms of goals set and goals achieved. The Bush Administration is a colossal management failure.
We are reminded about a statement made by Charles DeGaulle of France when he spoke about government leaders who were deemed to be highly indispensable such as people such as Karl Rove and Scooter Libby are said to be: “The graveyards are full of indispensable people.”
Ha, ain’t it the truth…