I’m in business and I deal with customers and competitors. Some have higher standards than others. Some talk, make guesses, and just sort of “get along”. Others get the facts, cover all the details, document their processes and guarantee that it’s right.
Now which kind of business would you want your country, the worlds only surviving superpower, to be? We should have higher standards.
Look at some examples:
1. The administration let FBI field reports slip through the cracks allowing not one, but four airliners to be hijacked and three flown into buildings on 9/11, even though we knew suspicious Arab nationals were training at flight schools. If you hired a security company and put them in charge of guarding a building, and somebody blows it up — do you renew the security contract for 4 more years?
2. There was bad marketing of US views to other countries and bad management of world opinion. The Bush administration turned good will after 9/11 in to bad will. If your advertising and P/R company lets your market approval rating plumment, would you renew the contract for 4 more years?
3. Abysmally bad intelligence gathering and analysis regarding Iraqi weapons program. If your people are telling you things that are 100% wrong, do you give them an incentive raise to stay on?
4. Poor planning on force requirements for Iraq war, resulting in our inability to even keep the electricity on after the invasion. If your project managers consistently come up with infeasible plans, do you keep them on?
5. Abysmally bad public relations in Iraq after the occupation began. If your customer service staff just makes disgruntled customers angrier, don’t you look for new folks? If your customers are so mad at you that they are willing to blow themselves up, don’t you have a problem?
6. Generally poor performance on the economic front, with a net loss of jobs, misdirected tax cuts and staggering deficits. If your broker loses money for you, do you stay the course?
7. Replacement of good science with bad science in environmental policy. Pollution on the rise and global warming ignored. A technology company cannot survive if its technology is based on politics rather than science.
8. Before 9/11, President Bush spent 40% of his time on vacation. If your employees don’t show up for work, don’t you take disciplinary action?
9. If you found that some of your employees were engaged in sexual harrassment and sadistic behavior in the workplace, wouldn’t there be an immediate management shake up? Yet the atrocities of Abu Garib prison in Iraq were covered up for a while, ignored, and there still has been no responsibility taken. If I had stock in a company that did that, I’d be voting for a new board of directors.
10. If your financial analysts came up with cost projections for a project that were inadequate, resulting in huge cost overruns, would you trust them in the future. That’s what happened with the Iraq war.
11. Finally if you were fed up with an employee and told them they were fired, but they started making threats of dire consequences if they leave, wouldn’t you have the security guard escort them from the building?
A country like ours should have higher standards.