Every promoted business manager faces challenges that were rolled to him by his predecessor.
From my consulting days, I know that all companies think that they’re competing in the most challenging industries, at the most challenging times, against the most formidable foes ever.
Effective managers read the cards they were dealt and craft the strategies and tactics required to remediate the issues and leverage the jewels.
Ineffective managers just whine about the weak hands they were given, remorse over unkindly “shocks”, and focus on ducking blame. In business they don’t last very long.
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Excerpted from Politics Daily: Obama, the Thin-Skinned President
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/05/27/obama-the-thin-skinned-president/
In a fundraising event for Sen. Barbara Boxer, President Obama repeated his constant refrain:
“Let’s face it: this has been the toughest year and a half since any year and a half since the 1930s.”
Really, now?
- Worse than the period surrounding December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001?
- Worse than what Gerald Ford faced after the resignation of Richard Nixon and Watergate, which constituted the worse constitutional scandal in our history and tore the country apart?
- Worse than what Ronald Reagan faced after Jimmy Carter (when interest rates were 22 percent, inflation was more than 13 percent, and Reagan faced something entirely new under the sun, “stagflation”)?
- Worse than 1968, when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated and there was rioting in our streets?
- Worse than what LBJ faced during Vietnam — a war which eventually claimed more than 58,000 lives?
- Worse than what John Kennedy faced in the Bay of Pigs and in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we and the Soviet Union edged up to the brink of nuclear war?
- Worse than what Franklin Roosevelt faced on the eve of the Normandy invasion?
- Worse than what Bush faced in Iraq in 2006, when that nation was on the edge of civil war, or when the financial system collapsed in the last months of his presidency?
- Worse than what Truman faced in defeating imperial Japan, in reconstructing post-war Europe, and in responding to North Korea’s invasion of South Korea?
In Obama’s eyes, he is always the aggrieved, always the violated, always the victim of some injustice.
He is America’s virtuous and valorous hero, a man of unusually pure motives and uncommon wisdom, under assault by the forces of darkness.
It is all so darn unfair.
Or maybe a man who was as unprepared to be president as any man in our lifetime — has over the last 16 months shown that he is overmatched by events.
Source: “Obama, the Thin-Skinned President”
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/05/27/obama-the-thin-skinned-president/
The Homa Files 
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