by David Phinney
Friday December 13th 2024

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Willing to Please

There once was a line of thinking that the sign of a good manager is when one knows his or her weaknesses and compensates those weaknesses with the strengths of a well-rounded staff. Good presidents also go out of their way to find the strongest thinkers of opposing views to help probe policies for their weaknesses and figure out where solutions can be strengthened.
Walter Isaacson explores this phenomenon in discussing former CIA director George Tenent and draws parallels to corporate life in the media:

George Tenet’s woes, it seems to me, come from the very natural instinct to please rather than tell uncomfortable truths to those in authority. Watching Bill Moyers’s show on how the media failed to question the march to the war in Iraq, I reflected on how I, likewise, when I was at CNN, was too willing to accept what those in authority were telling me. And reading Bob Dallek’s new book on Nixon and Kissinger, I was reminded how Kissinger, someone I once wrote about, was too willing to cater to and collaborate with the darker impulses of Nixon.

Here’s his blog on Huffington Post.

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One Response to “Willing to Please

  1. Sakir says:

    I have just discovered the BREAD-S cenpoct. This is exactly what I was looking for as a feature and naming in a framework. It’s stands for “browse, read, edit, add, delete and search”. For me it obvious that CRUD and BREAD sounds and are different things. The first naming is development oriented (CRUD), and the second one is more application (user) oriented (BREAD).

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