Category: Management

Too Merciful

Management

In any organization, when the head guy issues a policy directive (or a budget change which requires a policy directive ), the general reaction from his subordinates is to implement that directive within the time frame allocated.

Failure to do so generally results in a reprimand or eventual termination;  active resistance to the directive — or the undermining thereof — generally results in immediate termination, the latter being very definitely “cause” for termination, and few agencies or indeed even labor unions can quibble too much with the outcome.

Which is what happened here, in an agency of our beloved federal government:

President Trump has ordered as many as 60 senior bureaucrats in the US Agency for International Development placed on indefinite leave for taking actions to evade his executive orders. A memo from acting USAID administrator Jason Gray says, “We have identified several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the president’s executive orders and the mandate from the American people.“ As a result, we have placed a number of USAID employees on administrative leave with full pay and benefits until further notice while we complete our analysis of these actions.”

Then this happened:

Enter Director of Employee and Labor Relations Nick Gottlieb, stage left. He countermanded the order placing senior staff on administrative leave, by flat-out refusing an order to terminate contract employees: 

Today, representatives of the Agency’s front office and DOGE instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices to a group of employees without due process. I refused and have provided Acting Administrator Gray with written notification of my refusal. I have recommended in that written notification that his office cease and desist from further illegal activity.

It is and has always been my office’s commitment to the workforce that we ensure all employees receive their due process in any of our actions. I will not be a party to a violation of that commitment.

…so then this happened:

I was notified moments ago that I will be placed on administrative leave, effective immediately.

LOL.  This is what happens when you try to fight against the CEO.  Whether you agree with his directive or not, you are bound to implement it — that, or resign.

Now here’s my problem with all this.

This rebellious little apparatchik should have been shit-canned outright.  Instead, he’s been placed on “administrative leave”, which continues all his benefits and perks until such time as he’s finally terminated.  What bullshit.  Outright insubordination deserves no such forbearance.

And yes, I know:  our beloved federal government employees are somehow spared such treatment because it’s forbidden by their union, which is another fucking travesty:  why should government stooges be protected when their employment is regarded as “service” and not a commercial contract?

At some point, I hope that POTUS/DOGE casts a baleful eye at this nonsense, and gets Congress to outlaw public-sector unions outright.

There is plenty of precedent for this action, by the way, going back all the way to the Founding Fathers.  Even liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt said this:

“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service…. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations.”

Yet somehow this nonsense managed to get traction, especially during the 1960s, thanks to an Executive Order by none other than John F. Kennedy (quelle surprise).

If POTUS / DOGE achieve nothing else, the elimination of public-sector trade unions will be a signal victory for the people of this country — not that the well-being of our citizens has ever been a concern to government workers.

No, government agencies such as the State Department and the aforementioned USAID have always been far more concerned about the welfare of foreigners — in the latter case, to the tune of over $20 billion.

That, it seems, is about to change and not a moment too soon.

Fire away, Mr. President.

…And Speaking Of Big Auto

Business, Drive Time, Management

From the fools who bet on EVs as being the Next Big Thing:  Volkswagen and Mercedes.

Yeah… screw you and your little Duracell cars, screw you for buying into the Big Manufactured Panic stemming from the Global Warming Climate Cooling Change© hucksters, and screw you for trying to force us into buying your shitty fad products by cutting back production of regular internal combustion-engined cars and trucks.

And while we’re on high-level fools in Big Auto, ladies and gentlemen, I give you:  Stellantis.  This is what you get, and deservedly so when you let finance people run an engineering business.  Let me count the ways:

  • Misreading your core customers
  • Forcing inferior and low-demand products onto the market
  • Reducing product offerings when your competition offers choice (and having those remaining products be simply me-too choices, which you’re always going to lose especially when your products are less reliable and more costly)
  • Making long-term decisions based on doomsday (and fallacious) predictions
  • Sacrificing long-term growth for short-term profits (see below)
  • Ignoring basic marketing principles, e.g. when faced with growing reserve stock levels, increasing prices rather than cutting them.

Stellantis has broken each and every one of those oh-so basic rules, and the people who will pay the price are their employees, who are going to be laid off as their workplaces end up being shuttered.  Now, of course, they’re scrambling… in the face of being sued by shareholders.

Sadly, the people who have made all these disastrous business decisions will be fine thanks to generous severance packages and bonuses.  (Tavares’s compensation last year was worth $40 million, for example.)

instead of facing the proper consequences of public flogging followed by hanging.

Ummm Okay, Maybe Not

Corporate Wokism, Drive Time, Management

One has to laugh at this latest development:

Volvo has confirmed it has backtracked on its promise to sell only fully electric cars by 2030 due to a fall in demand for battery vehicles.

The Swedish company announced today it is now aiming for 90 to 100 per cent of its global sales to be either pure electric or plug-in hybrid by the end of the decade.

It comes in response to a decline in appetite for EVs across major markets, including a slowing uptake of battery cars among private buyers in the UK. 

Volvo executives said the delay to its EV schedule will ‘allow for a limited number of mild hybrid models to be sold, if needed’.

Let me be the first to say that “if needed” is going to become “vital to the company’s survival”, and the “limited number” will become most if not all of the entire product line.

In marketing terms, this is known as a “soft retraction” — note the shift from “all-electric” to “okay, we meant hybrids” — thus leaving space to keep using a normal internal combustion engine (ICE) instead of Duracell-only.

Gosh… let me see.  The original plan can be characterized as follows:

“We’re going to refocus our company’s entire product line into a technology that is unreliable, unsupportable and ultimately unsustainable, relying on a support system that doesn’t yet exist, all while hiding behind the twin figleaves of government mandate/coercion and feelgood eco-friendship”.

…because in cold hard business terms, that’s exactly what the “all-electric” policy came down to.

Were I a major shareholder in such a corporation, I would demand the resignation of the entire management group that initiated such stupidity.

Not for the first time, the oh-so politically-correct Swedes are getting their noses rubbed in the hard reality of their silliness (see also:  liberal immigration policy).

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of well-intentioned wokist assholes.

So Much For Mickey

Corporate Wokism, Management

Here’s a tale of how to screw up a franchise, perhaps the greatest franchise of them all:

Back in 2021, the bottom began dropping out of Disney stock, which had been worth around $175 a share before Disney decided to hyper-politicize its movies and TV shows. Disney specifically targeted little kids for grooming with gay-themed propaganda aimed at sexualizing them and encouraging them to question their gender.

Additionally, Disney destroyed some of its most beloved and profitable Golden Geese franchises—Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, Willow, Indiana Jones, etc.—by turning them into left-wing propaganda videos obsessed with sexuality, race, and gender.

And the result?

In April the stock rallied to $123 per share, up from $91 per share at the beginning of the year. In Early May, Disney stock reached as high as $116. But all this year’s gains are now gone. Currently, the stock sits at just $90 per share.

It will probably sink still lower — perhaps as low as $70.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of wokist, child-grooming assholes.  No corporation is too big to fail, and I hope this one perishes utterly.

Crowdstrike, Cloudburst

Business, Management, Technology

I remember having a discussion with one of my executive buddies a while back, talking about this whole business of shoving IT up into the “Cloud” and away from in-house (local) processing.  My buddy, (who is still very active in business) stated that he would never, ever do that because of control concerns;  I went even further and said that were I the CEO of a corporation and an executive even suggested such an action to me, I’d fire him on the turn.

Here’s the reason for my intransigence, and it’s a topic I’ve banged on about before:  the allure of “convenience” without caring about (or intentionally disregarding) the risk of vulnerability.  Here’s an example in a microcosm.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s we still did a lot of paper printing, as email communication of large files and documents was beyond the ability of most systems to accomplish large-scale dissemination.  At the same time, though, systems were changing from stand-alone processing into networked systems, and the most obvious of these was in the area of shared printers (as opposed to each workstation having its own printer).

Of course, IT was all over the networked printing principle because, as one clueless IT person told me, “we only have to maintain and service one printer as opposed to dealing with several, so it’s more productive” — confusing, as I pointed out to him, their convenience with the user’s needs.

What, I asked him, was the point of sharing a single device when there’s a traffic jam of users waiting around the printer for their job to clear the queue?  How productive was that, in the corporate sense, when one service technician would save time while half a dozen other workers were doing nothing?  And even worse, of course, was the prospect of the printer failing altogether (for whatever reason), causing everybody to sit on their hands while the machine was being fixed or having its ink cartridge replaced;  how productive was that scenario?

As I was beating my head against a corporate brick wall, I did what I normally do in such circumstances:  I declared unilateral independence.  I bought myself one of those HP500 inkjet printers (and black-ink cartridges) out of my own pocket and remained outside the system altogether, to the consternation of IT.  (My boss, bless him, told them to go and fuck themselves — those exact words — when they asked him to strong-arm me into compliance.)

Then over the following six months I monitored the network printer activity and catalogued all the times it went down, then calculated the net cost to departmental productivity, and presented my findings to Management at our next inter-departmental meeting.  (Basically, if the five largest users of the printers in our department had each had their own HP500, the department would have saved literally thousands of dollars in lost productivity.  In fact, it would have been a zero-sum decision to equip each of those users with their own laser printer, never mind a cheapie HP500, and left “casual” printing — memos, etc. — on the network.)

I won the battle and lost the war, because IT took its revenge on me from then on by slow-walking all my projects — and I did a lot of those — through the system, using the “limited resources” argument because, I admit, my projects were resource intensive.

It did not help matters when personal computers came along.  Of course, I was the first one to get one (out of my own pocket, again), enabling me to do a huge amount of developmental work independently of IT.  The head of IT came into my office and asked me to give him a demonstration of my PC.  I agreed to do it, but only after inviting my boss to sit in.  Then I ran one of my routines on the PC and we sat for about ten minutes waiting for it to process.  Of course, the IT guy sneered at the pace of the process, saying that the mainframe could have done the same job in seconds.

I then pointed out to my boss that the last time I had submitted an identical job through IT, I’d eventually got the output some three days later.  (And yes, I had the documentation to substantiate it.)

My boss, bless him again, asked me if I could set up a PC for him because he too was sick of waiting for his jobs to get back to him.

A week later, Management received a proposal from IT to set up dumb terminals in all our offices so that we users would not have to become our own computer programmers.  It was accepted by all the department managers except mine, who had in the interim found room in the budget to buy PCs for all the account executives, and tasked me with developing and delivering the necessary training.  (I outsourced it to a buddy’s training company because I had things called “clients” who had greater need of my time.)

Anyway, I told you all that so I could talk about this.

You see, apart from any talk of productivity and convenience, the dirty little downside to Cloud-based single-source processing is that having a single source also means that there is an enormous risk when any bad actor or even incompetent actor (such as in the above case) gets to access the whole show.  Single source also means incredibly-dangerous universal failure scenarios.

Ask the airlines, banks and hospitals affected by the above.  And incidentally, state vehicle inspections in our area of north Texas were also affected in that their inspection equipment failed to operate — and the operators didn’t bother coming into work because why should they?  And even when the systems did start working again, there was still a delay while the operators came back from their absence — machines and systems working:  nobody to operate them.

As I discovered two days ago when I took my car in to be inspected, at two different locations hereabouts.

Now scroll back up and re-read the first paragraph of this post.

Mighty Falling

Management, Retailing

Back when I were a young (!) data analyst and retail specialist at The Great Big Research Company, one of my minor clients was Walgreens Drug Stores.  (I say “minor” only because I was reporting only on the grocery section of the stores, and not the Rx or even the over-the-counter (OTC) drug or general merchandise products.)

Anyway, I became very friendly with one of the execs, and in one of our conversations she let slip that at that point in time, Walgreens had never — not ever in the history of the company — failed to make a quarterly dividend payment to shareholders.  I checked on that, and she was correct.  So a couple of years later, once I’d left Nielsen and was managing my own 401k account, I purchased a bunch of Walgreens shares and watched the dividend payments roll in, reinvesting them back into the business for several years.

Then one day I was driving to the local mall, and something stuck in my brain on the way there.  I couldn’t figure it out because that’s the nature of such things;  but on the way home I figured out what it was.

On the short five-mile trip between the mall and home, I had passed six Walgreens outlets.  And all my old retailer instincts came to the fore:  Walgreens was, in the industry parlance, over-stored.  Granted, this was in Greater Chicago (Chicagoland), where Walgreens’ head office was located, but still…

A short time later I sold all my WAG shares (at a very handsome profit).

Of course, all that was back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, but I note this recent development (as shared by Reader Mike L.) with interest:

Walgreens is set to close a substantial number of its roughly 8,600 locations across the United States as the company looks to reset the struggling pharmaceutical chain’s business.

CEO Tim Wentworth said on a call with analysts Thursday that “changes are imminent” for the roughly 25% of stores that aren’t profitable and Walgreens’ strategic review will “include the closure of a significant portion of these underperforming stores.”

“We are at a point where the current pharmacy model is not sustainable and the challenges in our operating environment require we approach the market differently,” he said.

Okay, fine,  This can and does happen to many a business.  But there’s a wrinkle:

Wentworth said the closures would focus on locations that aren’t profitable, too close to each other or stores struggling with theft.

The first two phenomena are common, while the third… well, let’s just say that unless I miss my guess (but I doubt that I do) a whole bunch of inner-city Walgreens outlets are going to be boarded up because of undocumented product movement.  And those areas are going to become not only “food” deserts, but “medication” deserts as well.  (The other kind of “medications” are firmly established there, of course.)

And by the way, Wentworth is a seriously smart cookie — unlike so many other corporate CEOs of recent vintage — so if he can’t get the existing show to work, it’s a safe bet that nobody in the industry can.