23 Comments

I find it interesting that Singh was able to flush his entire Board. That's some world-class stones on his part. And a serious (as in actionable) dereliction of their duties on the part of the Board members.

But this is just one more case of how people (most people, actually) are dazzled by the conman's self-confidence. His (or her) complete lack of results is okay because, look how sure he is! He must know something I don't, so I'll let him continue.

Thus, Trump.

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Fits in all too well with the stories my clients told me when I was writing resumes. We have a managerial class that is far too susceptible to flattery, a tool used for the most part by the most unworthy of subordinates. Countless workplaces have been paralyzed by the internal politics of having to suck up simply to survive.

Singh is a problem, but not the problem. Those who hired him shouldn't be in the business of making those selections. (And neither should HR, but that's another comment.)

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Obviously there are occasional notable exceptions, but American capitalism sure seems to select for assholes. Some of it must be hard-wired into our monkey brains - the overreliance on overconfidence as a proxy for competence; the preference of existing elites to help and mentor people much like themselves - but my God, it’s full of grifters. Whenever some tool suggests we need to run the country “like a business”, observe how most businesses are actually run.

And by whom.

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You should have put a "Trigger Warning for corporate workers" at the top of your post. Oh, lord, have you hit a nerve. After 25+ years in the IT field, mostly in big companies, I've seen all of this, and more.

One of those "some day" articles you play around with in your head, I keep thinking about is "Bigger, Faster, More Impossible: The Role of Heroic Narrative in Management Reporting." Assholes like this as they move up through middle management seem to universally think that reporting to their management how their teams worked impossible hours, did super-human things to get the impossible project done, is the way to look good. And with the psychopaths who are their bosses, it usually works. It doesn't matter that the team is now fried to a crisp, morale is lower than a snake in a ditch, that the quality of the output of the project is crap and the customer hates it, the whole point is to point to the goal and say "Look at what a hero I am." If I ever had a team lead under me try that, I'd put them on a plan so I could fire their asses at first opportunity. I would much rather have someone come in and tell me everything is going along as normal, problems are coming up, we're fixing them, things are routine and as predictable as possible.

It's not just big companies. In one of the smallest companies I've worked for, 30 people, we had 33% turnover in one year. At the end of the year, the former Senior VP of Sales at Oracle (huge red flag) who had been brought in to be CEO, proclaimed we had lost money because of bad investments. Someone finally had the temerity to ask "What investments?" whereupon he promptly spit out, "You people!"

These are the people who run stuff. It's no wonder things are fucked up and shit.

Oh, man. Is it every Friday. (actually I now work for an amazing company run by a brother and sister which actually does all of the stuff for their employees every other company just claims to do, like value them, so it's really just the trigger from your article.)

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I was fairly fortunate over the forty years of my alleged career, with mostly tolerable chiefs, including two whom I revered, and for whom I delivered my best work because I would have hated to let them down. Another boss, an erratic and vindictive character who practiced management by free association—I can deal with a bad manager, but sweet jeebus, give me one who is at least *consistent*, please—disliked me (I told people afterward that I found her off-putting at the outset, but that over the seven years of our association that first impression ripened into genuine hatred and fear), but fortunately I enjoyed the political protection of *her* boss.

Early in the last decade, at the height of my fortune and repute—I sat in on the councils of the mighty, admittedly below the salt, my role in the organization being two parts Holbein the Younger to one part Lear’s Fool—a regime change at the top caused my stock to plummet so steeply that I feared year’s end might find me chained to the perimeter fence at Gitmo with an eagle devouring my liver. I’m pleased to report that the final and worst boss managed to get his sorry ass fired sans parachute, golden or otherwise, and was damned lucky to have escaped criminal prosecution. My sources tell me that he was spotted last year working in the men’s department at a downtown San Francisco department store, and were I a marginally more vindictive person with less-developed powers of vicarious embarrassment, I’d be tempted to go look in on him.

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I've mostly had decent bosses when I wasn't a manager myself. But, Gawd, there are a lot of incompetents running things and then you have to learn how to "manage the client" or in this case boss/manager/supervisor or you'll end up doing twice or three times the work, almost all of it cleaning up the elephant's mess..

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"We all know about managers who abuse their subordinates, usually because (I presume some knowledge of my audience here) we have worked for such people" Looks like you know us pretty well. It's heartening to see how many seem to have escaped those situations and landed in some kind of safe place where they can enjoy working (I have too, though my old lady, starting a university teaching career in midlife a few years ago, has gotten into a really terrible one--there's some hope that will change).

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Take all the worst character traits of the worst managers you've endured, stick an "M.D." after their names, and you are a long way towards understanding how fucked up American medicine is.

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WORK!?

[ comment in lieu of Krebs ]

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It's not just the U.S. Roy. Bureaucracy adept, chutzpah replete incompetents have infiltrated governments all over the world.

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