Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
What do these have in common: My Lai massacre;Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse; Fast and Furious gun running to Mexico; IRS harassment of conservatives; Mount Rushmore shut down.
Tone from the top.
Everybody who deals with a giant organization knows what issues management is focused on, and what issues management doesn’t care about. You might get by doing as little as 15 minutes of useful work in any given week; but God help you if you forget to submit your TPS report. The rental housing inspector doesn’t care if the ceiling is falling down as long as the window latches work.
Nobody got orders to commit a massacre. They didn’t need no stinking orders. They knew what management wanted, without being told. That’s why leadership matters, to set the right tone so subordinates do the right thing without being told.
That’s why The Empty Chair is such a problem.
Joe Doakes
I also think it’s basic human behavior in organizations; absent authority, the best and worst in the employees comes out.
Unfortunately, with government, “the best” is “no harm is done”, which is what’s supposed to happen anyway; it doesn’t make headlines.
And the worst? Well, that doesn’t make headlines either – provided a Democrat is in office.
But you get what I’m saying.
It’s also worth noting that in the absence of leaders establishing a good corporate culture, there is generally a default corporate culture that tends to take over. In my current employer, it’s the place most employees came from, and in my former employer, most people over the age of 50 are still working for “Edgar,” the company’s founder.
If you understand these things, you can get a lot of good done. If you never try to understand, you can get yourself in a world of trouble in a hurry. I am guessing that there is such a strong culture that Obama alternately ignores and uses to avoid personal culpability.