To be fair, American management was never particularly brilliant. “Founders” often get excessive and undue credit for their management skills when, mostly, they have been nothing more than lucky. Usually, the only thing they did “right” was stay out of the way while other misguided employees fixed the business problems. From Henry Ford to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elmo Musk, undeserved luck drove their successes far more than their business insights or management skills, if they had any skills at all. Ford and Jobs and Bezos, for example, owed more of their success to the people they accidentally hired and, then, while those “founders” (a loose term, in Jobs’ case) were busy self-aggrandizing their own importance the people in the background built the products, refined the processes, hired the critical skilled labor, and built the businesses out of a misplaced sense of mission. Most of the infamous historic American robber-baron/management characters were just money shufflers and many weren’t all that good at that, either, needing regular and constant infusions of government “investment” to shore up their defective products and services. (Yeah, I’m talking about you, Elmo.) However, with the recent FAA debacle, we’re watching the total collapse of American leadership at the federal Executive level: wall-to-wall incompetence without a single worthwhile skill anywhere in the administration.
This isn’t a new problem for the USA, but Reagan’s destruction of the tax code to encourage gambling over investment and inheritance over effort and skill, the resulting proliferation of MBA programs, and the subsequent collection of unskilled managers polluting companies from small to huge is an out-of-control problem for US businesses. I’m talking about people who can’t do anything useful relative to the mission of the business. Examples are hospitals and medical product companies managed by non-medical professionals, engineering and manufacturing companies managed by people who’d be stumped trying to assemble an IKEA coffee table, aerospace and computer companies managed by 1st semester nepo-baby college dropouts or clueless MBAs with family wealth making up for their inabilities, and, even, retail stores mismanaged by people who wouldn’t touch one of the business’s customers with a ten-foot pole let alone try to sell something those customers would want.
One of the things we used to harp on, when I was a Philip Crosby “Quality Is Free” coach in California in the 1980s, is that everyone in a functional organization serves someone. That means everyone, including the CEO and every executive down from there. I don’t mean serving the stockholders, I mean serving either the company’s customers or the people who directly deal with the customers or the people who design or manufacture the company products. Today, I see most corporate executives concentrating on serving themselves, without any idea that they should be doing something more productive. Sadly, most of them can’t do anything more productive because they don’t have the necessary skills.
Trump and his minions are the
logical extension of a country that has worshiped unskilled management for too
long. There isn’t a single person in
Trump’s cabinet or appointees who has an employable skill. Hegseth might be the poster child for
overachieving, unskilled, useless men, but picking him from Trump’s crowd of
useless spoiled children is just a bottle-spin.
No matter where the Trump administration-bottle pointed, it would land
on someone totally useless for any real task or occupation, let alone the job
they’ve been assigned. The people who had
failed at every position of responsibility they have ever experienced are now
driving the country down that same sewer pipe.
Oddly, organizations and professional employees that least need management meddling seem to get the most of it. Hospitals and academia, for example, are overrun with hoards of managers desperately looking to justify their existence. Not desperately enough to actually do useful stuff, but desperate enough to find all sorts of busywork for the people they should be serving. Because management skill naturally declines as you climb the corporate ladder (The Peter Principle), the more the executive is paid the less useful they become. Follow this trend for a few generations and you’ll end up where we are today: in a leaderless, skill-and-expertise-free morass of failing institutions and second-rate industries.
One important skill every nation needs in every area of public and private activity is leadership, real management skills. How we might move from this current low point to something resembling the quality movement of the late 1980s is hard for a pessimist like me to see; but it’s either that, or failure. We need to start by recognizing that simply buying an MBA is no indication of management ability. In fact, like many Liberal Arts degrees, an MBA is almost perfect evidence of inability, unless it is combined with a STEM education. Obviously, the Ivy League hands out MBAs in Cracker Jack boxes and that kind of foolishness trickles down to “higher education” everywhere. I don’t know if the solution is to first reform “higher education” or the institutions who education is supposed to serve. Irrational demand for MBA graduates certainly drives the production of these hapless diploma drones, but what created that demand in the first place was the decimation of the federal income tax code in the 1980s. Return the 1950s upper-income tax rates and the “unearned income” taxes and the demand for skill-free money changers would fall immediately. When the rich have to “shelter” their income in productive investment instead of mansions, mile-long yachts, and political bribes, it’s possible that money might go back to work. It’s also possible that we’ve traveled too far down the path to empire collapse and there is no way back.
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