Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The Gang That Doesn't Shoot Straight

It is getting comical. We could laugh if it didn't involve the President of the United States. The man who holds the office which once was universally recognized as the most powerful position in the world now seems to be unable to ever act without taking serious wrong steps first.

The administration speaks long before thinking. The voices are not as one but tend toward a random order in which the components apparently have never held a face-to-face decision conference first. One department says something, another says something different, Jay Carney parses language and then Joe Biden gets "over his skis." The Prez does his best Mussolini chin-up pose and speaks to the hand-picked audiences.

Rendell on Booker on Bamster on Bain

When your ads are so inane and puerile that even your own party says they nauseate, you've got a problem!

Does anybody in the Messiah's camp really think the American people don't understand basic business concepts? Sorry. That was a rhetorical question and the answer is apparently that a lot of them think we are that stupid. That is a serious under-estimation.

The Bain business is a perfect example. What does Bain do? They buy low and sell high. What do they buy? They buy companies that are in trouble and hence on the final clearance table at the market. The capitalist then goes in, revamps the company to make it profitable and then sells it for a gain.

When a company is in trouble there can be many reasons. It could be bad management or bad products. It might be quality issues or marketing. It might be staffing or overhead. Changes are going to be made and in the process that means some folks might lose their jobs. If you aren't essential, you are extraneous.

Bain and similar companies don't succeed by sympathetically keeping unnecessary or unproductive workers on the payroll. They succeed by getting lean and mean. In the process some folks get hurt and some get rewarded. New people with different skills get jobs. Dead wood gets pruned.

The guys who go laid off are not going to be effusive in their praise of the company that took over and let them go. Making political commercials with them is easy but also ingenuous.

American voters and apparently even senior Democrats are smart enough to know that.

2 comments:

an Donalbane said...

Jack Welch noted well over a decade ago that, in the long run, keeping unproductive employees on the payroll damages both the company and said employees.

By eliminating unproductive workers sooner, rather than later, they have the opportunity to assess, and possibly upgrade their marketable skillsets before they become stagnant sclerotic siphons on the income statement.

Cold-hearted? Not really. Delaying what needs to be done is a disservice to the enterprise's shareholders, as well as the
uncompetitive workers. Better to regroup and retrain at 35 than to finally meet the inevitable at 55.

But the OWS types and administration minions will never understand such basic logic.

Chuck Coffman said...

This is good stuff, obvious but not apparently to close to half the country's population. Sometimes it's not even about unproductive employees. Sometimes the business needs to be repurposed and the old skills are no longer relevant, you know, like typewriter repair. That doesn't mean that typewriter repair isn't important, we're just not in that business any more. It's about making money and in the long run, that's a good purpose. Making money is about the only real unbiased measure of merit in our economy. In my opinion of course.