Troop morale

I want to say one thing about how NOT to be a manager:

Don't lie to or intimidate your employees.

In the end, if you want us to work well, and to trust your leadership, just tell us the truth, without using fear or threats. If you do practice the worst kind of management, the highly qualified people who have any sense of dignity or intelligence will just leave. They will be disgusted with your perpetual incompetence and manipulation and leave you just when you least expect it.

They will be smart enough to leave you in your moment of need, biding time to take sweet revenge.

Then you'll be left with the sniveling idiots who lack the backbone to tell you to your face that your strategies don't work. You'll be left with the people who lack an exit strategy or any other options, or the ones craven or desperate enough to stay and deal with your continuous abuse and psychological torture. Don't think that we don't check with one another to see what you have told each of us, and that we don't know you to be a weasel who's willing to lie to old friends and colleagues.

And thus your deceit creates the lowest kind of troop morale. We're disheartened by your lies, your shoddy decisions, your lack of leadership and vision. You're like some kind of amputated general who only knows how to shoot bb guns fighting an infinitely financed enemy who has heavy artillery, stealth bombers, nuclear missiles and the like.

And you can't even shoot straight because you've always got your beer goggles on.

There's a difference between rallying the troops for battle and deceiving us. It's the difference between nurturing and tending to an injured soldier's wounds and telling him that he might as well blow his head out now, and giving him the gun to do so.

It's why we have low troop morale. You lie to us and expect us to eat this shit up because you figure there's no other life but that of the military. We go into service because we believe, but there's only so much grime and tears you can swallow before you decide to leave or desert.

Why fight a battle you know you're not prepared for? A good general would survey the conditions and terrain and deliver a sensible verdict. You don't just send men and ammo into hopeless skirmishes just to say that you're doing something, damnit. Your actions send loud signals to the opposition about your level of guilt, desperation, and foolhardiness. It's the kind of thing a desperate alcoholic does while floundering about in a cesspool of his own vomit, expecting the rest of us to drown with him.

Well, I'll be damned if I go down in your filth. I'm making my way out of this quicksand but in the meantime, it's back to work.

UPDATE: On the topic of poor leadership, President Bush said that of his five years in office, the highlight was . . . . . . .

Catching a fish.

"I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound (3.402 kilos) perch in my lake," he told the newspaper in an interview published on Sunday.

Yes. This is absolutely true and can't be made up. It says mountains about what he's accomplished, which is nada. It also says he's a pretty piss poor father, because you know he could have said that he was proud of raising two fine girls (although I guess to call them fine would be a stretch, and to say that they were well-behaved would be like calling Paris Hilton a prude.) But if you're going to go all off topic and quotidian and try to be an average Joe you could have given a shout out to your family.

These things make me want to secede into Petoria. I have the sneaking suspicion that I'd be under better leadership there.