Management 5
Almost every business of any consequence, isn’t being a business! They’re DEI or “progressive,” or going to “change the world,” and, as always, strive to monopolize their domain so they have the endless funds necessary for their non-business, often subversive, activities.
But here’s the rub: these clowns are also dropping like flies due to that wackiness, and their bungling.
A business should just do its job, and let that be the end of it! No exceptions! You make your widgets, and make the best widgets you can make, and no more.
Also, it’s not brash to insist that we should never allow businesses to donate to charities, a nasty impropriety. Instead, a company can provide that money they feel so free to throw around, as bonuses to their employees, who can then make their own charitable donation to the charities of their own choice.
As to the why of the thing, it should be obvious. Donations create a nasty loop of potential collusion. Perhaps most dire, donations may alienate your own employees, and customers. They drain resources from the company to feed a potentially evil “charity.” When a company sticks to its knitting and builds the best widgets it can, in the most efficient way possible, and is charitable to its employees only, most everyone benefits.
If you’re a serious business, but without external “support” of some kind, like favorable bank rates, government contracts... you won’t be able to survive putting in bad managers. It’s all collusion and everybody’s tight within certain circles, but sincere businesses will need management that actually can manage, not cronies, DEI hires, nepotism hires, ego hires.
How do you get good people? First off, you vet them — like ensuring they understand the facts presented in this series of Management articles, and how to implement the reforms suggested therein.
As for hiring staff, one must understand how ego comes into play — everyone will want to hire someone they like, someone like them, a toady, a yes-man. Then there’s that horrific, yet common, situation, where people hire others just to boss around. In their minds, they’re practicing “management,” but have no clue. All this has to be avoided, and we already saw that the tactic for hires is to hire the person who has had consistent success in previous positions. With this strategy, a company can contract the first person through the door that meets that standard.
Now a hard-hitting truth, particularly crucial information for anyone running a business: In general, people have no idea how to run a company. How could they? Most haven’t built their own company from scratch, and it’s absurd to assume that some drone, marching up through the ranks, is going to magically be able to do so. There are a few geniuses, of course, but no business can count on that. Then you add cronyism, nepotism, corporate sabotage, incompetence and more to the mix...
This means that it’s easy for bad players to get control of otherwise good corporations. It means it is easy for companies to fail. It means a lot of corporate inefficiency, (but since the big ones are at a “revered” status, they get cheap loans, government (taxpayer) bailouts, and so on, that most small companies can’t count on).
So, wake up. If you’re involved somehow in management of a small business, you can’t emulate the big business structures and practices. Plus, you need to take a harsh look at yourself, and decide if you’re a toxic leader. You’ll need to stop acting “the boss,” and learn to share the ideas and responsibilities, and, radically, implement a whole new structure for your business that we’re building up to with these articles.
The Bad Examples
Bankruptcy List
Anyway... It’s stunning to read the list of bankruptcies from 2023 and 2024, all examples of incompetent management. Here are just some of them, the big ones like The Body Shop and Red Lobster, banks and airlines, and Tupperware, True Value and TGI Fridays. As you would expect, there’s a much lengthier list of smaller companies filing.
| 99 Cents Only |
| Basic Fun (legacy toy brands owner) |
| Big Lots |
| Blink Fitness |
| Body Shop |
| Bowflex |
| Conn’s HomePlus & Badcock Furniture |
| Delta Apparel |
| Express (clothing retailer) |
| Joann (fabrics and crafts) |
| LaVie Care Centers |
| MRRC Holdco |
| Party City |
| Red Lobster |
| Rue 21 (apparel) |
| Silicon Valley Bank |
| Spirit Airlines |
| TGI Fridays |
| True Value |
| Tupperware |
| Vintage Wine Estates |
What Has Dodge (Stellantis) Done?
Dodge, completely misreading the public’s appetite and mood, has produced an electric Dodge Charger doomed to flop completely in the market. They’ll have to lie and squirm and get lots of discounted fleet sales to try to patch over and hide this fiasco.
This new electric Dodge Charger Daytona won’t just ruin the Charger and Dodge’s reputation, but may bankrupt the company (Stellantis). Solution is simple/not simple: a crippling (for Stellantis) price drop isn’t enough... these cars are failing right out the gate. (More than) one bricked after five miles’ driving. They’ll need to suspend the electric cars, and release the gas rigs (they’re designed to accept either engines or electric motors with some tweaking). It’s a tough decision but these things just cannot be foisted off on the public. For those they do sell, offer a 10-year, comprehensive unlimited mileage warranty, with free loaners while in the shop. Fire everyone responsible for this thing, especially Elkann, born April Fools day, the chairman.
Intel
Intel is laying off over 15,000 employees, the headline reads. After $7 billion in losses in 2023, and $18.8 billion in 2024, one has to wonder how it can be so incompetent when it was so dominant in the past. Plus all its government support... You have to be some special kind of screwup to bugger that up.
Jaguar Wants the Stratosphere
Jaguar abandoned all its cars, except for the F-Pace SUV, wanting to pursue an all-electric, ultra-luxury vehicle strategy. This will fail.
Where are the studies, spreadsheets, surveys that motivated the company to strike out on this path? That’s a checklist for the shareholders to reference when asking questions at the next shareholders meeting.
That they don’t do all the hard work reminds of the kid who didn’t do his homework, except this is real life, and hard work like doing the statistics, developing and pushing through good ideas, and motivating the staff, is the default, expected. It’s dereliction of duty not to do it, in other words.
Yes, what’s with all these “executives,” not just in the auto industry, but most others as well? They’re at a wine tasting. They’re on a publicity tour. They’re cutting a ribbon. Expressing their often worthless opinion in an interview or speech. If you’re pulling in $40 million or more a year, you should be working harder. You’d have little time for frivolity, and you’d be immersed in stats and files, continually assessing new strategies and options.
Funny. They always have a strategy to come out of down-spirals and bankruptcies, that they never seem to employ prior to the crisis.
Radio Shack
Too bad, it was a useful enterprise for quite a while. But... good riddance. Radio Shack was very aggressively demanding addresses at the till, ostensibly for its promotional mail-outs. The persistence was very unsettling, and, again, what sort of dweeb is setting these policies? It went under soon after, not to be missed.
Cleaning House
It always seems to come down to a crisis situation.
Dbigkahunna on ZeroHedge
Years back I worked for a company that hired a person whose only job was to reduce headcount... he told everyone there the next Monday the company was going to be 30% smaller and those left would pick up the slack... Firings began that afternoon. At 4PM a bus load of security people rolled in and went to designated people with a bankers box. They got 10 minutes to clear their desk and were escorted out... Everyone got nice severance packages. But you want to talk about the ole sphincter being hunched up.
It was cold and quick. And completely impersonal. It took about 2 years for everything to play out but the company wound up much stronger. All the little fiefdoms and klaches were decimated. It sucked, but it worked.
The question being, how does this, or any, company get that way in the first place? The management system and structure we use is wildly unworkable, except for the top tier of companies, that don’t come under the same rules as everyone else.
Yet it isn’t blindingly obvious the system is buggered, and that is because it’s what we’re indoctrinated with from childhood, when we’re sold this ridiculous hierarchy, starting at school, where you have, for example, teacher’s assistant, teacher, vp, principal, superintendent... Of course these simple-minded hierarchies, essentially all the same bad structures, are not just at schools, but are everywhere, no matter how unworkable or inappropriate.
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