Enron, Hurricane Katrina Examples of Leadership Gone Wrong

Because American business people have been taught that managership is the same as leadership. See:

http://www.virtualbookworm.com/bookstore/product/A_Leadership_Vacuum.html

shadowchb of PA 4:34PM November 30, 2009

Who do we blame for the deficit in leadership? Parents who did not show moral values or the business schools who taught only about how to market and screw the population? For the past twenty years, starting with Ronald Reagon this country has gone down an ever increasing spiral of bad, immoral, unethical and ideological leaders. I cannot even say leadership, their has not been any wothy of mention. We have consistently picked out men who have been marketed and sold as moral, upstanding, leaders who turned out to be unethical, weak, no moral or virtues worth mentioning. The parties have literally BOUGHT and paid for their positions. What we need to do is clean up and CLEAR OUT both houses. These guys are just sitting there biding their time until they can retire, and selling out to the highest bidder from the 'special interest' groups. We have a Congress for they corporation, by the corporation, and in the corporate interest. As long as we keep voting in the same type of loser, we will keep getting a swift kick in the butt. We have allowed a Party to run Congress and the White House. It is time we select young, new, female and male representatives. We all know already what men CANNOT do and what they will do to screw us all. It is time to create a new PARTY that is inclusive of all people, men and women. Most women have a nurturing instict and should be given a chance to prove what they can do---afterall, they can do no worse damage than most of our male presidents or legislators. We should not go by what the PARTY markets but judge the individual by his actions not his words. I hope and pray we make better choices in the future or we will drive this nation down a dark hole we may not be able to get out of. Look at how this nation has treated the least of us, the infirm, the children, the elderly who built this nation. We should hang our heads in shame for allowing the greedy, unethical, corporations to pay millions to men who leave their entities in ruins through greed, who have cut the pay of hardworking Americans, who have sent our jobs off-shore out of greed, who pushed this nation to the brink of disaster all out of greed. If we truly want change, we will have to change the whole of Washington. Let's start by ridding ourselves of all the selfish lobbyist who are there only to shaft the rest of us.

A. Geary of IA 3:20PM November 30, 2009

Enron and Katrina were not GW Bush leadership failures. Rather, they were under, or left over, from another administrtion. The FEMA was a very, very small agency when Bush inherited it. It's total staff was 2500 persons; hardly enough to manage a disaster that covered an area the size of Nebraska.

On the financial meldown, the Bush White House sent over fifteen bills to Congress in efforts to fix the exact areas that led to this economic disaster we are seeing. And, even now little has been done to really fix it.

The sooner certain members of Congress are replaced, the nation can get back to the moral and ethical footing needed.

I agree that such teaching should be in the basic life skills taught at home. Most of all, parents need to understand that the children mimic what the parents do, more than what they say to do. If you tell your child not to smoke; don't do it either.

I have seen many leaders that were brick walls when it came to wrongdoing. Most came from middle-class families and had some college. They had worked at meany different jobs and were able to carry on an intelligent conversation with few uhh, you know, like, etc. inserted into the utterances.

I saw them at home and they were the same brick walls on the subjects of integrity, honesty and acceptable conduct as they are at work. The Mothers of these families was as strong about it as the Father; and the older children followed that pattern.

The stronget advice I ever heard a Father give a son who was about to leave home was in the car going to the airport (I was providing the wheels) when he said, "I kow I have made some mistakes in raising you. And, I'm aware that you also know what they are. My wish for you is that you don't make them when you have a family."

In the mirror I saw the boy give his father the most convincing look of admiration I'd ever seen. His reply was, "I'll try, Dad."

These are the type leaders we need running our nation. This type of person is not trained in Schools, Colleges or Universities. Home is where the foundation of the core values is laid. The other places build upon those rocks.

Gerald Eberwein of AZ 11:26AM November 28, 2009

A piece of paper doesn't correlate with "Emotional Intelligence". Some of the most intelligent people are savants who lack social or ethical comprehension. We need more generalists who can connect the dots and see the Big Picture — not persuasive specialists with tunnel vision encompassing only the bottom line.

Even if business schools required leadership & ethics course it would be too late for many students to really internalize the message. It must start in childhood. Research shows that children raised in a faith-based environment are generally more morally conscious. The idea being that even if your parents or your government isn't watching your every move, someone else is — and you ultimately reap what you sow. The alternative is "irrational exuberance". Even former Fed. Chairman Alan Greenspan was forced to admit is that markets are not always self policing. In theory they should be. But in reality, human nature predominates. So while Warren Buffet preaches that "greed is good", it is also an impetus for cutting corners. Oftentimes the gamble pays off. And gambling, whether it is a casino or other people's money on Wall Street can be addictive. When the process of betting the farm against large sums of money becomes normative, objectivity is gone.

What ultimately was the last check and balance to go was the deregulation effort that began under President Clinton and continued under President Bush. It was largely responsible for dismantling the hard-knock lessons that spurred regulatory law in the wake of the Great Depression. We became cocky, sure these were useless free market impediments. We didn't appreciate that the stability that allowed us to prosper after the Great Depression was bought and paid for with other people's lives and livelihoods. Instead Sen. Phill Gramm became a leading "insider", deregulating to the advantage of the energy industry and the financial markets. In exchange for the effort, Gramm and his wife, Wendy, landed positions in industries that benefited from the couple's work while in public office. This indicates that our conflict of interest laws are not stringent enough, firstly; and it tells us, secondly, that a whole host of ills that adversely affect our economy stem from faulty campaign financing in which public servants are indentured to their private corporate donors. This is THE "root cause" the public underestimates, and it will wreak more havoc if term limits are enacted to "incentivize" public servants to keep their private sector job opportunities open by serving special interest groups in exchange for job offers.

Ken Lay, of Enron, admitted that without the success of lobbying for "reform" the company would not have crashed and burned. Same goes for Tyco, Global Crossing and WorldCom. This object lesson applied to deregulated finance, too, but we instead trusted that "self interest" would keep us safe. It didn't with energy or finance — or anything else.

Pride goes before a fall. It always has.

NewsView of CA 3:51PM November 27, 2009