Leadership or Just Following Rules?

Opinion

Opinion written by George McClellan:

How in the world does a huge corporation, like United Airlines, faced with eager competitors engaged in the sole business of public transportation, believe it somehow has the inalienable right to club some fellow over the head, who bought their product, and drag his bloody body, inchoate and screaming, out of the seat he just purchased and down the aisle with dozens of onlookers, with iPhones I might add, as witnesses, and think they are doing a good deed? It has nothing to do with leadership because their is no leadership, just a manager with a rule book!

Good intentions are the opiate of the Progressive/Socialist class empowered by a pre-developed mind-set that does not allow for individual reasoning, decision making or accepting responsibility for mistakes. All responsibility now lies in “books of rules,” tomes of ‘one size fits all’ command and control, relegating no authority to anyone to say “Stop it already, enough is enough!”

As far as United Airline’s problem is concerned, hundreds of cheaper and understandable  remedies have already been posited on the social media sites so I’ll not add my views here, but, I’d  rather focus on why leadership has failed. It’s an easy study; we have failed because we have over burdened ourselves with rules, thousands of rules, books of rules, and have given the power to enforce those rules to people who apparently have little or no understanding into the constitutional reasons why those thousands of rules are generally archaic, invalid, and legally unenforceable, but are enforced anyway. It’s a subject that is rarely ever discussed. Where has American leadership gone awry? Where are the examples of the leadership that was once Americas? There are none. Progressivism has seen to  that.

Hopefully, not too many public companies, like United Airlines, entertain clumsy business models that permits the clubbing of customers. But, as they are corporate entities that follow unbendable rules, they will pay the penalty in lost ridership, rotten PR and declining stock rvalues, and worse, possible bankruptcy, throwing hundreds of employees onto the dole.

For companies like United, apologies from top managers,”we re-accommodated him” are laughable and meaningless. Unless corporate structures change to the point that any employee, at any grade, is empowered to fearlessly call a halt to such stupidity when they see it, the carnage will continue. That’s the problem with strict adherence to rule books. There is no wiggle room so, blame the rule book.

In the United Airlines case, any member of the cabin crew should have had the authority, right then and there, to stop the assault and battery on a customer when other remedies were so easily available. The unhappy lesson of a mind-set that draws its actions from an inflexible rule book, that denies authority to employees to make spot decisions, is soon to be realized by the coming massive lawsuit, and will hasten a reevaluation of the unintended consequences of strict management by the no tolerance book of rules. Stupidity always accompanies indecision. When the lack of making an apparently simple decision is denied to the very employees who could have stopped it, then “stupidity” becomes the norm.

Last question. Who thought it was important enough to call the Airport Police to physically remove the customer from his paid seat? As a result of such stupid thinking, there are now, additionally, three police officers on the dock for taking action that was not not theirs to take, by enforcing some idiotic rule of a private corporations decisions to ruin their public relations. The good news is that United has apparently decided not to club their passengers any more.

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