I recently attended a government technical conference that was very poorly led. At the end, they put together an “outbrief” which consisted of a few PowerPoint slides that could be presented to senior leadership.
The slides were carefully worded so as to be utterly inoffensive and bland. They said nothing. The goal was to make no commitments (who wants to be on the hook for future work??) and to avoid stating an errors (who wants to be wrong about anything??).
Leadership attended the outbrief and loved it. These are people who control a billion dollar budget. The loved it and they praised the conference organizer for doing such a great, great job and for making so much incredible progress.
OMG. Who thinks this is good?? This is just people pretending to do work.
Government inaction and political correctness will haunt us so long as no major politician wants to avoid giving offense or taking a stand.
One of the things I love about Trump is that he doesn’t tone it down and he’s not afraid to speak bluntly. We need someone who offends people and points the finger at the problems.
Consultants first and foremost know who they need to please.
A consultant that “speaks truth and fact” anyway, usually does not get future opportunities.
I went against the status quo with a few leaders who were seriously, seriously putting a multi-million dollar company asset at risk. Every single day.
In the end, I could change nothing. Hopeless as it was, I left because there wasn’t even a short-term there.
Any network administrator, of which I am not, would be horrified at what I found.
My theory is that the soldiers came home from WWII and built a big government which they ran with military precision and then retired without passing on their skills. TV was invented, God was removed and mom left the home. All the kids got fat and sad and scared to do anything.