The Management Style 'du jour" and "Life without Rummy..."

thanks to james wolcott for the link to this inventory of devastation...

Among the many unhappy developments in American industry in recent decades has been the advent of "wreck it and run" management. A small coterie of senior managers takes over a company and makes a brilliant show of short-term profits while actually driving the business into the ground. They bail out just before it crashes, cashing in their stock options as they go, and leave the employees, ordinary stockholders, and customers holding an empty bag.

wow...! i just had this incredible flashback to united airlines... ~shakes head~ i must still be de-toxifying...

in all seriousness, what william lind describes is precisely the approach to management that is being encouraged by bushco... with cox's appointment to the sec, expect debacles that will make enron look like a sunday school picnic...

It is increasingly clear that under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. armed forces have also been taken over by "wreck it and run" management. When Rumsfeld leaves office, what will his successor inherit?

(to catch all the color commentary, go read the full post here...)

• A volunteer military without volunteers.
• The world's largest pile of wrecked and worn-out military equipment.
• A military tied down in a strategically meaningless backwater, Iraq.
• Commitments to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of future weapons programs that are militarily as useful as Zeppelins but less fun to watch.
• A world wary of U.S. intentions and skeptical of any American claims about anything.
• Finally, the equivalent of an unfavorable ruling by a bankruptcy judge in the form of a lost war.

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