Anyone with a brain who has ever worked in a corporate setting can appreciate Maier’s critique of corporate culture, which comes in the form of what reporter Craig S. As Smith points out, “with chapters titled ‘The Morons Who Are Sitting Next To You’ and In other words, systemic failure is not some kind of faceless enterprise. It is the result of Corporate employees know that many of these wrong decisions are often taken because those It is precisely this sort of behavior that disgusts a senior CIA officer, Michael F. Scheuer, who Scheuer cites “bureaucratic cowards” and writes that the commission’s widely acclaimed The Nincompoop in Chief’s nomination of Porter Goss<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> to “The intelligence community does not need a feckless czar with fine surroundings and little
\n1) “corporations are not meritocracies,” and 2) “work is organized a little like the court of Louis
\nXIV, very complicated and very ritualized so that people feel they are working effectively when
\nthey are not.”<\/P>
\n
\nSmith describes as “a slacker manifesto,” is all about working in France. She is French, after all.
\nBut what Maier complains about, which is especially visible to people in middle management,
\napplies as well to American companies.<\/P>
\n
\n‘Beautiful Swindles,'” her book “Bonjour Paresse” (“Hello Laziness”) “declares that corporate
\nculture is nothing more than the ‘crystallization of the stupidity of a group of people at a given
\nmoment.'”<\/P>
\n
\nindividuals who make wrong decisions, people with names and responsibilities whose collective
\naction ends up as the sort of “groupthink” that the 9\/11 Commission has blamed for the
\nfailure of the U.S. intelligence community to thwart Al Qaeda’s strikes against the World Trade
\nCenter and the Pentagon.<\/P>
\n
\nwho make them do so out of cowardice, out of the craven need to brown-nose higher-ups. They
\ndo not want to be accused of not being team players and risk losing their jobs. They do not want
\nto displease their bosses. So they go along to get along.<\/P>
\n
\nheaded the agency’s attempt to track down Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999 and who
\nhas since written the current best seller
\n(and copied to The New York Times), Scheuer blasts both the CIA and the commission for not
\nholding individuals responsible for the devastating intelligence failures.<\/P>
\n
\ndisappointing. It “seems to deliberately ignore those who were clearly culpable of negligence or
\ndereliction.” He warns that by “finding no one culpable, you will allow the mindset that got
\nAmerica to 9\/11 to endure and thrive in whatever new community structure is established.”<\/P>
\n
\nhead the CIA confirms Scheuer’s point. As does the nincompoop’s resistance to creating a new
\npost of overall intelligence chief with authority over the budgets and personnel of all U.S.
\nintelligence agencies, as the 9\/11 Commission has urged.<\/P>
\n
\nauthority,” William H. Webster<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>, who led the
\nC.I.A. during the Reagan and first Bush administrations and is also a former director of the F.B.I.,
\ntold the commission on Monday. “That is the wrong way to go.”<\/P>
\n