A Very Bright Bunch

Their executive team was composed of some very bright people indeed, or at least they thought so since they'd all graduated from top schools and shared the same experiences and attitudes. They professed a deep attachment for the average worker, at a distance, of course. It was difficult for them to conceive of any of their decisions as being wrong or unethical because they were such good and well-informed people. If they concluded a course of action or practice must be right, then it must be right. Any individual reservations would be quickly subdued by confidence in the group. After all, Harry had a Stanford MBA and Carol was on law review at Yale.

Few of them had ever actually created anything. They didn't see that as a drawback because in their mirrors they saw knights of ideas, bold enforcers of illuminating rules and policies. The rules were more for others than for themselves. Their main job was vision and they didn't want that blurred by messy details. Their ideology was cloaked in pragmatism and they possessed just enough pragmatism to be dangerous.

They stressed the bottom line and routinely shot messengers bearing bad news. They held a vibrant impatience with anyone who didn't appreciate their good intentions or see the grand improvements they were planning. Their first reaction was that critics were simply ignorant and in need of education. Their second was that these malcontents were driven by ill-will.

Although they spoke often of compassion, they also stressed toughness and "street smarts." The latter was amusing because few of them really knew the street or the factory floor other than in a social worker or sociologist capacity. When doors were closed, these self-proclaimed idealists mocked the very employees they claimed to revere.

They had a strong belief in the power of the spoken word and valued eloquence highly. This gave them an unwavering confidence in their ability to talk around any problem. [Many of them had law degrees and lengthy experience in being able to craft clever defenses of the indefensible.] It also gave them faith in their capacity to convince. That faith would be frustrated when they encountered people who strongly held opposing convictions.

They liked speed and were wary of process. [When the wisdom of your decisions is self-evident, process is such a pain.] They suspected that middle managers and first-line supervisors might not share their enthusiasms. In many cases they were right. This caused them to push decisions that could have benefited from more debate and other perspectives. They had plenty of arguments, but only among themselves, and the thought of bringing in any real outsiders was ridiculous.

They were very bright people, heading for a train wreck.