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August 17, 2004
THE WRONG WAY
Anyone with a brain who has ever worked in a corporate setting can appreciate Corinne Maier's complaints that 1) "corporations are not meritocracies," and 2) "work is organized a little like the court of Louis XIV, very complicated and very ritualized so that people feel they are working effectively when they are not."
Maier's critique of corporate culture, which comes in the form of what reporter Craig S. Smith describes as "a slacker manifesto," is all about working in France. She is French, after all. But what Maier complains about, which is especially visible to people in middle management, applies as well to American companies.
As Smith points out, "with chapters titled 'The Morons Who Are Sitting Next To You' and 'Beautiful Swindles,'" her book "Bonjour Paresse" ("Hello Laziness") "declares that corporate culture is nothing more than the 'crystallization of the stupidity of a group of people at a given moment.'"
In other words, systemic failure is not some kind of faceless enterprise. It is the result of individuals who make wrong decisions, people with names and responsibilities whose collective action ends up as the sort of "groupthink" that the 9/11 Commission has blamed for the failure of the U.S. intelligence community to thwart Al Qaeda's strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Corporate employees know that many of these wrong decisions are often taken because those who make them do so out of cowardice, out of the craven need to brown-nose higher-ups. They do not want to be accused of not being team players and risk losing their jobs. They do not want to displease their bosses. So they go along to get along.
It is precisely this sort of behavior that disgusts a senior CIA officer, Michael F. Scheuer, who headed the agency's attempt to track down Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999 and who has since written the current best seller "Imperial Hubris" under the pen name Anonymous. In an e-mail sent to the commission (and copied to The New York Times), Scheuer blasts both the CIA and the commission for not holding individuals responsible for the devastating intelligence failures.
Scheuer cites "bureaucratic cowards" and writes that the commission's widely acclaimed final report was extremely disappointing. It "seems to deliberately ignore those who were clearly culpable of negligence or dereliction." He warns that by "finding no one culpable, you will allow the mindset that got America to 9/11 to endure and thrive in whatever new community structure is established."
The Nincompoop in Chief's nomination of Porter Goss to head the CIA confirms Scheuer's point. As does the nincompoop's resistance to creating a new post of overall intelligence chief with authority over the budgets and personnel of all U.S. intelligence agencies, as the 9/11 Commission has urged.
"The intelligence community does not need a feckless czar with fine surroundings and little authority," William H. Webster, who led the C.I.A. during the Reagan and first Bush administrations and is also a former director of the F.B.I., told the commission on Monday. "That is the wrong way to go."
Should it surprise anyone that if it's the wrong way to go, a White House steeped in corporate culture (and supported by Rummy Boy) can be counted on to push for it?
Posted by at August 17, 2004 11:17 AM
