Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Yes, and I was helping you decide.
He's talking about a woman who worked in the White House, was the Dean of HLS, and the Solicitor General before she was 50. Any one of those jobs would be the career highlight for most people. If he thinks she's failing upwards, he should try to figure out why she's doing it with such velocity.
Seriously -- there's a huge difference between her career and a law professor who writes pointless articles on technical subjects that no one will care about.
There seem to be a lot of those people around if you go looking for them, but why bother?
|
No one goes looking for them. They find you. It's time we define them more accurately. The first step to eliminating something inefficient (and they are) is describing it.
Do I think we'll eliminate the 80/20 rule, or make corporate hierarchies anything close to lean? No. But we might be able to get it up to 70/30. We might be able to find ways to create better corporate structures that don't inevitably start rewarding people for covering their asses and failing to offend while producing questionable results.
The market needs to find a way to get rid of the "free agent" culture driving wasteful CEO pay. But along with it - something we also need to focus on desperately - is finding a way to eliminate the scads of employees who fit into Brooks' misplaced description of Kagan.*
*The woman's clearly bright and talented, but let's face it, dude... She has no real private sector experience. She has experience dealing with regulation of the private sector, and issues involving the private sector's interfacing with govt. Actual private sector experience means working in the private sector, being responsible for managing some element of a private sector entity. I don't see much of that. She's worked in jobs where politics trumps balance sheet. Brooks probably was wrong to criticize her lack of decisiveness. The real criticism might be that, like so many who've checked the career boxes she has, what she lacks most is experience with reality.
