In the corporate world, there’s a tendency among many at the middle management level to be jumpy when it comes to the whims of the CEO. I’ve seen it happen at plenty of companies. The CEO says something in passing and it filters down to the peeon level as an urgent priority. This interruption almost always has the effect of disrupting any progress on existing projects.

This trend is even worse in a cases where the executive in question insists that their pet requests are more important than they really are. This isn’t just because the CEO is interrupting existing work, but because they’re often changing mangagement styles instantly. You can’t switch from a hands-off, delegate-to-your-underlings style of CEO to a classic micromanager without throwing a monkeywrench in your organization’s ability to succeed.

Having said all this, I think it’s important to realize that today’s big news (from Ron Suskind’s upcoming book “The One Percent Doctrine”) is a classic example of why our CEO President is a man who has failed so poorly in his job of leading the nation that he’s endagering our country’s safety :

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind’s gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war’s major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda’s chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries “in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3″ — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, then the FBI’s top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”
. . .
Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. “I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

I’ll bet the President has no idea how disastrous his quest to keep from “losing face” has been. Or maybe he does and just doesn’t give a shit. At least, that’s the impression I get from this excerpt from the same article :

The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

I can’t help but wonder how much better off our country would be if we’d had a President who took his job seriously for the last six years.