“A child should be able to look
into its mother’s eyes and see its own reflection. I looked into my mother’s eyes and saw
confusion”
----Dr. Ralph Chandler
Twenty
years ago, I found myself in graduate school studying public
administration. It was here that I
mastered and learned to love statistics; it was also here that I met Dr. Ralph
Chandler. Ralph, who is regrettably no
longer among us, was an interesting man.
He began his collegiate career in seminary school but soon heard other
callings as in mounting an unsuccessful bid to win a seat in the Florida legislature,
later turning to political science and, by degrees specializing in management
and public administration. By the time
I had met him he was teaching and had recently published a book celebrating the
centennial of American Public Administration in which he edited the works of
many of the most outstanding authorities in the field, many then still living,
adding introductions and commentary. It was an effort that would earn him a
nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a consultant for businesses and
local units of government, screening candidates for middle and upper level
management positions both within government and in the private sector.
His
method of screening involved the administration of several ‘aptitude’ tests;
tests for which there were no right or wrong answers; tests that measure
personality traits and the influence of one’s personality upon one’s management
style and, by extension, how effective a manager one would likely become. For this purpose, a battery of tests,
including personality inventories and what was called a FIRO-B test was
administered. Students were then
required to write a ten-page mid-term paper explaining what the scores meant
and why; and a final paper with the same objective directed at the manager
under whom one presently found oneself laboring. It was a revealing exercise.
What
struck me about what the tests revealed was the lasting impact one’s childhood
experiences on one’s behavior later in
life; and what struck me most while writing the second paper was how much the
man I then worked for so much resembled my own management style and, given that
the job interview, done as it was by committee, involved perhaps less than ten
minutes of direct dialogue with my future employer signifying that surely there
must have been a great deal of subliminal non-verbal communication. For the
principal in question was chairman of the board and the body so assembled
readily acquiesced to his will. I got
the job because it was his choice.
I bring
this up because I have since applied the criteria to subsequent primary
employment relationships as well as observing behavior tangential to my station
but within my view; for it helps by way of analyzing power, both the practice
and the practitioner thereof, as a means of controlling what is within my
purview and understanding and explaining what is not. This, leads us by
degrees, to an analysis of the management style of our present Caesar
Disgustus.
From his
behavior, it appears that his Philosophy of Management is, perhaps,
a reflection of his own self-image. He
views subordinates as not competent, not liking to work, hesitant to assume
responsibility. People and production
concerns are felt to be in conflict; so, rather than choosing one or the other,
the manager feels his best option is one of withdrawal from employees and
isolation from organizational issues.
His philosophy often manifests a cynicism which is likely borne of
frustration traceable to his powerlessness to have any meaningful impact on his
organization. These traits manifest
themselves in his almost daily impotent rants on “Twitter”, his abdication not
only for the substance of any meaningful legislation, but his complete
abdication of a president’s responsibility to not only become knowledgeable but
to sell his agenda leaving the heavy lifting to subordinates and members of
Congress, and his failure to “own” the results if they are either not to his
liking or fail to materialize.
When it
comes to planning and goal setting
he is found abdicating decision-making and planning responsibilities so that
the employee group has total control. This can be seen in his total abdication
of the writing of the Rescumlican health bill to Paul Ryan, and his total
abdication of the Senate’s effort to Majority Leader McConnell and his band of
six senators behind closed doors. In the extreme, he will withhold his own
views, as with the Republican Health Care proposal passed by the House of
Representatives that he later called “cruel”.
His involvement, such as it was, consisted in making a few phone calls
in the waning hours for the congressional leadership, knowing that this man has
so little command of the issues and the facts, cannot be relied upon to
knowledgably push the legislation. So strong is his need for acceptance that he
feels employees will not “like” him if he imposes decisions that affect them
or, in the political context, the greater public that constitute his core
political support. Therefore, this
‘leader’ is seen looking to others to take the lead, and the heat, in advancing
the agenda.
Regarding
implementation of policies tRUMP’s
management style reveals a manager who provides little direction to his staff,
instead reportedly spending his days “twitting away” while watching and
reacting to news coverage of his White House.
It has been reported that senior White House staff have had to appear on
television talk shows to get our ‘leaders’ attention concerning important
policy initiatives. But here we wander
off to a more extreme version of the detached manager: after having failed to
provide clear and specific instruction (for his attention span is far too short
for mastering direction and detail), he avoids any contact or involvement with
the work except even when things do not go according to ‘plan’. Usually this type of manager when finding
himself so constrained will seek direction from superiors but, this being the
oval office, the “Buck”, as Harry Truman once pointed out, “Stops Here”, a
concept this clown has yet to get through his thick head. The result is that the White House has been,
for nearly six months now, in nearly constant chaos even to the point of several
supporters contending that Disgustus, reveling in chaos, has created “chaos by
design”. Management, where it exists at
all, is “Management by Exception” in which the principal underling must
distinguish his or herself by some egregious error in the eyes of the leader
for any action to take place, as in his firing of the Director of the FBI, his
Press Secretary and now his Chief of Staff as well as his disparagement of his
Attorney General because of their presumed failure to keep the feds off the
trail of his corrupt financial and business dealings. Disgustus only “acts” when by doing so he is
either furthering or, in his mind, protecting his business and alleged
fortune.
When it
comes to evaluating subordinates, a
critical function of any manager; for management without evaluation, indeed I
would postulate continued and ongoing evaluation, is management in name
only. Here we find the classical ‘weak
manager’ who, conducts evaluation only if required—here not by policy or
precedent for he respects neither—but by crisis. When he does evaluate we find him seeking
methods that limits his personal involvement and responsibility, instead
seeking safe and impersonal means—as again in the misuse of Twitter. Reports pour out of the White House of his
rants, his abuses of staff and department heads, and his management—if it can
be called that—by crisis.
There
are many reasons why one finds oneself later in life exhibiting traits that are
neither attractive nor productive; most of which involve the lingering
influences of childhood. tRUMP
biographer David Cay Johnson has said in several television interviews that
Disgustus once told him that he didn’t want to look inward for fear of what he
may find. This comment is telling for it
not only reveals fear of demons, real or imagined, or perhaps, real and
imagined, but it also reveals a low self-image; the lingering effect of which
can be seen in his constant use of superlatives, his constant need for praise
and acceptance bordering on adoration (as in his first cabinet meeting), but
foremost on his creation of an outsized and outlandish façade behind which he
can mask and hide his innermost fears, anxieties and inadequacies. Why he fears that he is worthless and that he
must now compensate by projecting a façade of great wealth; that he is impotent
and must now compensate by projecting a façade of great power; ignorant and
that he must now present himself as the only one who can ‘solve this mess”; and
anxious and that he must now declare in open debate that he has the ‘greatest
temperament’ than anyone seeking the presidency, isn’t solely that he is all
those thing and that he has every right to fear confronting who he really is
but he must also confront a childhood with transactional and detached parents
finding himself relegated to a military school—a catch basin for waifs of those
who have no idea what to do with them. In a word, tRUMP looked into his mother’s eyes
and saw only confusion. All else
follows.
The
truth is that Disgustus has at his core, and by his own account, a large
“unknown”, the depths of which he is terrified to plumb. He has been described by the co-author of “The Making of the Deal” as a man who,
at his core, is nothing more than a ‘black hole’, without conviction, without
knowledge, without a conscience. Columnist George Will has recently opined that
Trump can best be characterized as one who “does not know what it is to know”. He is, in the parlance of your Texan, “All Hat
and No Cows”; which is to say that he is mere shell, mere illusion, form
without substance. How else does one
explain the grandiosity of his language, and the outlandishness of his personae,
especially when joined with the vacillations on policy and the complete
ignorance of and refusals to learn the basics of governance.
To
demonstrate what I mean by way of illustration, consult his business
model. tRUMP inherited a small real estate
fortune involving management and ownership of a rather significant
portfolio. He promptly ran it into the
ground culminating with the bankruptcies of his Atlantic City casinos and other
properties, bankruptcies causing New York banks to write off nearly a billion
dollars of tRUMP debt. PBS’s “Frontline”
in a profile of both Clinton and tRUMP last summer reported that the banks
quickly realized that had they cut up his ‘empire’ into its constituent parts
they would lose even more money than if they kept the name and tRUMP as a
front-man. This created a wholly new
business model in which tRUMP’s wealth, such as it is, is largely leveraged
debt where he owns the buildings, or, more commonly, building that pay him for
the rights to use his name but structures in which he has no investment at
all. In short, the tRUMP business model
became a “Hollow” one, a mere label—a golden brand—upon the investments of
others. This persona was reinforced by
the ‘reality’ television show “The Apprentice” which found tRUMP posturing as a
‘chief executive’ presiding over what were, in effect, very small plans and
enterprises. Reality television is not
reality. It is illusion. And here we see the circle squared, the
suspension of disbelief, fantasy (façade) projected as reality. Here, on national television, Disgustus could
project his carefully scripted image a thousand times, as at a carnival’s
“house of mirrors” where a single image is replicated into infinity giving the
illusion of great depth where there is no depth at all. Here he is full pomposity upon display,
hollow to the core.
A few
months ago, I was taken to task on Facebook for remarking that Disgustus was
nothing more than a common carnival barker.
His supporter was outraged taking me to account. I apologized that I had indeed been in error
and, therefore, must humbly recant saying that it is unfair to characterize
Disgustus as a mere common carnival barker.
It does injustice to his station, for indeed he is an uncommon carnival barker.
This is
what happens to a man when, upon looking into his mother’s eyes for the first
time, finds only confusion. “Yowzah,
Yowzah, Yowzah, step right up”, cries the Barker, “and see the ‘greatest show
on earth’”. Perhaps, but keep moving
along, don’t linger too long, and don’t look too closely; for concealed therein
is a shell game and a fraud.
This man
is categorically unfit to be president of the United States. Hillary described Disgustus well when she
said he was temperamentally unfit for the job and that he would be, embracing
as he does the worst managerial traits, a disaster as president.
mpeach and Imprison.
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