When I read this in Monday’s L.A. Times, at first I thought I’d turn it into a nice little sarcastic Tweet.
But then I realized how monumentally arrogant, destructive, and irresponsible this defense of management blunders is…
…and for some reason it reminded me of certain radio executives I’ve encountered over the years.
In an article about Universal Pictures’ year of flops, studio President Ron Meyer is quoted as saying, “90% of our decisions were the right ones with the wrong results.”
Either the reporter didn’t think to question the validity of that assertion or an editor deleted the follow up question. (Because the Times appears to have, at most, one fulltime copy editor, I’m guessing it’s just bad reporting.)
Think about that: “We made the right decisions. It was the results that were wrong. Don’t blame us; blame the results.”
Huh! And all along I’ve been thinking it’s the results that tell you if the decision was right or wrong.
Have you ever experienced someone like that in your radio career?
“The last five jocks I hired turned out to be such losers. I can’t believe how incompetent people can be.”
“It was a great promotion. Too bad the stupid audience didn’t respond the way they were supposed to.”
“Deregulating and consolidating absolutely were the smartest things to do. The only reason they appear not to have helped radio is we need more deregulation and consolidation.”
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That’s the great thing about leadership. It’s painfully apparent when you don’t have it. Good leaders own their successes and their failures. I’ve never seen a strong leader who didn’t share their success, and I’ve never seen a strong leader who didn’t take personal responsibility (in some manner) for the failures.
It’s a little something I’ve noticed, and find far too lacking these days.
-Greg
An astute observation. Do you remember the book, The Peter Principle? The author asserted that in a heirarchy, a person who does well in one position will ultimately get promoted to their level of incompetence. It’s another way of saying that top decision makers in an organization are most likely to be ‘in over their heads.’
Whatever happend to ‘Management by Objective?’ Simple concept. What do you want to happen? What does it take to get there?
Hey Dan, I guess you could expect those kinds of answers from someone who watches Dilbert all day long in the office LOL
I learned skepticism when leaders began meetings with “I bet the audience will …”
Audience research does matter.
You just can’t trust the audience to do the right thing, can you 🙂
Can you imagine Einstein having this view point?
How confident would you be in a surgeon who shared this philosophy?
Dan, I’ve left radio and gone back to school. I’m in week 4 of my Management course. The #1 thing I’ve learned so far? Most of the folks I worked for in radio didnt know the first thing about management.
When it comes to management in radio.It is a vast wasteland of people who can’t do anything. Well, they have lying down pretty good.
We get the bottom feeders from hell.
Oh ,yea, I forgot they hate,”Hate” people who are creative and have talent.