I fear that I would be remiss if I did not post about the greatest disaster to occur in my lifetime. After 60 plus years on this planet, I thought that I had experienced every disaster imaginable. I have survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Cold War, Vietnam War, multiple economic catastrophes, multiple stock market crashes, multiple tornados and hurricanes, the gas crisis, continuous war in the Middle East, Y2K, 9/11, and the Gulf War. I lived through them all and made it out of the other end unscathed and into what I thought would be a nice retirement with grandchildren on my knee …. Vera, Chuck, and Dave.
I should have paid attention to the Jaws theme song that was playing in my head as Dopey Don floated down the escalator spouting racist bullshit, but no I did not. I thought to myself “He’s My President, so I must respect the office and give him a chance”. Well, I gave him a chance through the continuous bullshit that he spouts, continuous economic turmoil, pussy grabbing, porn stars, firings, hirings, tax breaks for the wealthy, bankruptcy inducing debt, nepotism, narcissism, racism, and every other “ism” that there probably ever was. I’ve had all I can stands and I can’t stands no more. The shit has hit the fan, the fat lady has sung, and the rabbit has died. This Corona Virus has exposed all of his weaknesses, poor management, poor planning, and narcissistic nepotism that has been an inherent part of the DNA of Donald J Trump from his birth.
As a retiree that is pretty much relying on savings and investments, I can say unequivocally that a $1200 check for my pain and suffering resulting from the mismanagement of DJT ain’t much use. It is good for nothing other than maybe making some virus masks out of the dollar bills with scotch tape and for maybe wiping my ass when I get diarrhea. OK, I shall stop the rant and propose some solutions from management 101 and 60 plus years of common sense.
Having spent a considerable amount of time working for a successful corporation and then owning a tech business, I will use that as the basis for my suggestions, since it is the only frame of reference that I have. When you have a poorly performing employee, and let’s face it, Don is our employee, you are forced to make some tough decisions. You could fire them, although it seems to me that is a last resort. Well, we already tried that and found that there exists a cabal of enablers that can block that effort. We shall call them, for lack of a better name, Republican Senators. Now typically when you have a bad employee, firing is not the first choice, so in my opinion that whole effort should not have been the goto approach to addressing this issue.
The method for addressing a poorly performing employee should always be a logical progression of steps with clear expectations and outcomes for each step. Step 1 is to ensure that your employee knows what is expected of them and to make sure that they understand the reasons that they are underperforming. In the case of Don, well, he threw the instruction book out the window and made up his own expectations based on what he wanted to get out of the job. I just gotta say right here, that if I did that on day one, I would have been sent on my way with a box of pencils. But he was hired and has been enabled so we need to move on.
The next step is to gather the evidence of underperformance and present it to the employee. Well in our case, I think that it is pretty easy to do that since we are in the middle of the biggest fucking disaster in my life time, and as far as I can tell, Don is spending the majority of his effort on blaming everyone else for his failure to lead. The evidence can be summed up by looking at the businesses that were all allowed to build a house of cards in their stock price by the government funded buy backs through tax breaks, the subsequent collapse of the stock market when the Corona Virus blew that to shit, the unemployment rate, and the ballooning national debt from the tax breaks and the Corona Virus Stimulus package.
The final step in my opinion should be to give the troubled employee a mentor and a specific project to work on. The project must be small enough such that the employee can have a success and gain some confidence in their abilities. Now this most crucial of steps brings us unfortunately back to the “fire his ass” step. We have a 70 plus year old dude that listens to no one and has complete confidence that he is always right and that he never lies. I believe that a 70 plus year old dude that has been doing shit the same way his entire life is nigh unto untrainable. There is no mentor that he respects and no project that he would be willing to work on, period. This is a man that has adopted the philosophy that there are only two critical steps to be accomplished in any project. I leave you with the two steps, as they appear to have worked flawlessly for a certain Mister Donald J Trump. The two steps are mutually exclusive, so I list them separately. Coincidentally, they are also the last steps in any project, so consider them to be used as shortcuts on the next assignment you get from your boss. That is of course assuming that anyone ever gets to go back to work before the fucking world ends in a zombie apocalypse of COVID19 brain eating zombies.
Every project ends with either
A. The claiming of credit step
B. The assigning of blame step.
Don and his team are feverishly working on both of these steps simultaneously as we speak. I know I have said that these steps are mutually exclusive, but that is only in a world where the normal laws of physics apply.
