Management

The Bo Deplaning Background: A Picture Not Quite Worth 1000 Words

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I reluctantly replaced the background photo of Justin Carter (who is still, by the way, awaiting trial for the crime of making a sarcastic comment on Facebook that post-Sandy Hook hysterics decided to treat as a terrorist threat) and put up the iconic photo of Bo, the Presidential dog, being solemnly escorted out of an Osprey to join the First Family in another spectacularly ill-timed vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, together with a photo of the National Debt clock. I hoped the background picture would save me the proverbial thousand words, because I think it speaks eloquently to several issues. But I have already received some squeals of protest, so I’m going to have to use up some of those words after all.

I generally have no problem with any President taking vacations, since the job is impossible and it travels with him, no matter how much he might wish otherwise. I have a problem with Presidents spending excessive amounts of the nation’s time in partisan fundraising, but that’s another issue. As one of the President’s supervisors, I have serious concerns about this President taking so many vacations, because, frankly, I don’t know what he does all day. He appears to have no foreign policy, other than making speeches, waffling, and dithering. He says he is making the economy his full time priority, but I see little indication of that. We know he doesn’t dirty his hands with engaging in politics and forging compromises with the opposition, and based on his statements and stunned surprise when incompetence or misconduct appears, he seems not to know what is going on in his own departments. We know he doesn’t trouble himself with oversight or management—even #1 fan Chris Matthews admits that.

Obama said on The Tonight Show (he has time to appear on The Tonight Show) that the U.S. has no domestic spying program. Today we learn that the NSA has habitually violated privacy restrictions on its spying, meaning that we don’t have a domestic spying program, just a spying program that repeatedly engages in domestic spying. Call me a stickler, but I think a few of those down days on vacation should have been spent instead actually learning what was the real situation before he told the nation things that weren’t true. Or was he lying? If you prefer that explanation, fine. That is another ethical issue. Continue reading →

Now THAT’S An Untrustworthy Legal Secretary!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

 

"Hey! That's Barbara! See you at wok, Monday, Barbara!"

“Hey! That’s Barbara! See you at work, Monday, Barbara!”

The Connecticut Law Tribune reports that Barbara Kalpin, a former legal secretary at the Waterbury law firm of Grady & Riley,  has been charged with stealing more than $1 million while forging dozens of checks and documents.

She was, the story says, “a longtime and trusted employee at the firm.” It seems the firm’s trust was misplaced.  Investigators have discovered that she spent about $500,000 over the last few years at an off-track betting venue in New Haven for horse and dog racing. According to police, she wrote 93 checks from a client fund that she managed, among other things using the money to pay credit card bills and to finance multiple mortgages on her home. Kalpin is facing two counts of first-degree larceny and 112 counts of second-degree forgery, and is awaiting arraignment next week.

Connecticut’s bar, like every that of every other state, imposes a strict obligation on attorneys to supervise non-lawyers who are placed in positions of assisting in legal work and the handling of client matters: Continue reading →

Sorry: I Would Fire Don/Dawn Ennis

/ Jack Marshall / 90 Comments
Old Don, Dawn, New Don

Old Don, Dawn, New Don

Let me begin by saying that I have no idea what is going on, was going on or will be going on with ABC producer Don Ennis. Unless he has the worst sense of humor in the world, whatever it is isn’t good, or anything I would wish on someone else. I am, to a point, sympathetic. However, if I were his employer, I would tell Ennis today that he will have to work out his unusual identity issues somewhere else, and I believe that would be the right thing to do. It may not, however, be the legal thing to do, which is one of approximately 268 reasons I’m glad that I am not Mr. Ennis’s employer.

Not that it wouldn’t be exciting. If you hadn’t heard, last May Don Ennis, a well-respected ABC News editor and previously unambiguously male, entered his newsroom wearing a cute black dress and an auburn wig and announced to a stunned staff, colleagues and superiors that he was transgender. The ABC News national assignment editor said he was forever more to be known as Dawn Stacey Ennis. “Please understand,” he said in a statement, “this is not a game of dress-up, or make-believe. It is my affirmation of who I now am and what I must do to be happy, in response to a soul-crushing secret that my wife and I have been dealing with for more than seven years, mostly in secret. A father of three, “Dawn” announced that the newly-confirmed she was separating from her wife of seventeen years.

His colleagues were supportive, as was everyone else in the media, which is why you probably hadn’t heard the story. They left flowers on Dawn’s desk; ABC News President Ben Sherwood wrote her a note of support. I would have done likewise. This is a real problem, and exactly the kind of personal, medical crisis that the workplace ought to accommodate, while providing emotional support for the difficult and courageous transition. Thus Ennis continued to work at ABC sporting hormone-induced breasts, make-up, lipstick, skirts and heels. This undoubtedly caused a period of adjustment and awkwardness, but I would expect mature professionals to handle it gracefully.

Today, we learned, along with ABC, that Ennis has had a change of heart, and almost everything else. In a jaw-dropping e-mail to family and co-workers  titled “Not Reportable, Very Confirmed,” Ennis explained that he was Don Ennis again. “That will be my name again, now and forever. And it appears I’m not transgender after all.” Continue reading →

Scapegoating Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments
Scapegoat

Meet Rick Eckstein. He understands. Really.

As it does predictably and constantly, the daily drip-drip-drama of baseball has given us another ethics quandary to ponder, arising in the context of the sport but with far more significant applications. The issue: is it ethical for an organization to deal with a crisis by firing someone for symbolic value, rather than for cause?

I have written about this traditional phenomenon in baseball before, but the current example is far less defensible on either tactical or public relations grounds. Last season, the Washington Nationals accumulated the best record in the sport, and though they flopped in the play-offs, were almost unanimously expected to be strong pennant contenders in 2013 by baseball prognosticators and more importantly, their fans. So far, at least, those expectations have been dashed. The season is almost two-thirds done, and the Nationals have been uninspiring at best. They have won fewer games than they have lost, and are trailing the Atlanta Braves by an alarming margin. Their pitching has been worse than expected, and their offense has been atrocious.

As is often the case in baseball when teams have a disappointing season after a good one, there is no obvious way to fix the problems mid-season, other than to hope the players start playing better. Unlike the other major team sports, baseball team performance is notoriously quirky, just like the game they play. Excellent players have down years frequently (though not the same players, or they would no longer be considered excellent). Team chemistry evaporates; the ball bounces funny ways. In the case of the Nationals, the most obvious problem has been a flood of sub-par years from almost all the starting position players, with an unhealthy serving of injuries.

The team’s response to its frustration and, really, lack of any substantive way to address it was to fire the team’s batting coach, Rick Eckstein, last week. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Organizing For Action

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments
Guess whose Twitter account followed Samantha and her friends...

Guess whose Twitter account followed Samantha and her friends…

The Hollywood Gossip web page thinks its hilarious that the twitter feed supposedly assigned to the President of the United States was found to have, among the 650,000 odd twitter accounts it was following, at least one hard porn site listed. It’s not hilarious. It’s symptomatic.

This isn’t even the first time this has happened. Last year, the same site that purports to put out tweets from Potus (and occasionally does, which are marked with the notation “bo”) was outed as following the descriptively-named “Celebrity Side-Boob.” This year’s funky fave (it has since been removed) of  @BarackObama is Wicked Pictures, and it sells a lot more than “side-boobs.”

barack-obama-porn-company-twitter_2

The President’s tweets are managed by Organizing for Action, the supposedly private, non-profit, non-governmental, non-political organization morphed out of Obama’s campaign apparatus (and if you think I have major ethics problems with a sitting President fronting a non-profit political advocacy group, you’re correct). Continue reading →

The White House Is Lying To Us. Again. Why?

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments
David Plouffe...or Dan Pfeiffer...it doesn't matter, really...the voice is the same.

David Plouffe…or Dan Pfeiffer…it doesn’t matter, really…the voice is the same.

Nobody of sound mind who listened to top White House advisor (he’s the current David Axelrod) David Plouffe spin like the Wheel of Fortune on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos could continue to deny that the White House, a.k.a Barack Obama, is determined to obscure every thing and anything it can that might help us assign accountability for the Administration’s negligent oversight and management, if not outright abuse of power. The smoking gun was that this pre-programmed, trained and paid mouthpiece said this:

PLOUFFE: Well, I’d say first of all, you know back in the previous — or the prior administration, the NAACP was investigated after Republican members of Congress asked for it. But there’s been no suggestion — the independent — the prosecutor looked at this — excuse me, the inspector general, and said there was no politics involved in this. No one has indicated at all that the White House is involved. The IRS director was appointed at — under President Bush, served under both presidents attested. No one from — so, this was not a political pursuit.

I don’t know if it was “a political pursuit” or not, but I do know that when the people in power desperately don’t want their fingerprints to be found on something potentially sinister like this, I am more suspicious than I would be if they just let the facts out: Continue reading →

The Peculiar Delusion of Dan Pfeiffer, a.k.a. “The White House”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
Captain Smith, of the "Titanic." Of course, there's no proof that he did anything wrong.

Captain Smith, of the “Titanic.” Of course, there’s no proof that he did anything wrong.

What does it tell us about the White House (and its primary occupant) that its “insider” and designated spokesperson, Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer, could utter a statement like this, in public, no less? On Fox News Sunday, one of four Sunday Morning Talk shows he appeared on yesterday to deliver the current White House position on multiple scandals, referring to Sarah Hall Ingram, who led the agency’s tax-exempt division when it targeted conservative groups and has been promoted to chief of the health care reform office, Pfeiffer said,

“No one has suggested that she did anything wrong yet. Before everyone in this town convicts this person in the court of public opinion with no evidence, let’s actually get the facts and make decisions after that. There’s nothing that suggests she did anything wrong.”

Such manifest nonsense would be depressing coming from a recent college grad, and grounds for demotion from a corporate manager or CEO, but it is nothing short of frightening coming from the heart of a nation’s leadership.

Continue reading →

Advertising Ethics: How Low Can It Go?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Trade commentators have noticed a welter of really offensive ads lately, and a suspicious pattern: an ad is released online that no sentient being could possibly believe is tasteful or appropriate, the ad attracts exactly the kind of negative response that any 13-year-old could have predicted, and the company remorsefully removes it, with an abject apology.  The latest of this invasive species was a Hyundai ad showing a despondent  man rigging a hose from a Hyundai IX35’s exhaust pipe to the car interior as a suicide attempt. As he sits in his car, waiting to die by inhaling carbon monoxide in the dark garage, a light comes on he opens the garage door, with the words appearing on the screen,  “The New IX35 with 100% water emissions.” See? You can’t kill yourself with a Hyundai! Hilarious!

Yechhh, and most viewers detested the ad. Hyundai Motor Europe quickly responded,

“We understand that some people may have found the IX35 video offensive. We are very sorry if we have offended anyone. We have taken the video down and have no intention of using it in any of our advertising or marketing.”

“No intention”?  That’s odd, because the ad was already online. Hyundai North America quickly took the moral high ground in apparent contrast to its European sibling. “We at Hyundai Motor America are shocked and saddened by the depiction of a suicide attempt in an inappropriate UK video featuring a Hyundai,’ it said. “Suicide merits thoughtful discussion, not this type of treatment.” Continue reading →

“Your Boss Is Insane”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On the site Learn Stuff, Sarah Wenger has produced an infographic with a strong ethics message, aimed at the vast number of people in management and supervisory positions in business who abuse their position and power, making those they lead miserable, unproductive, and insane themselves. How many horrible bosses inflict themselves on the nation? That is a mystery, though we know it’s a lot. Incompetent, unfair and irresponsible supervisors at all levels,  as the feature states,

“cost their employees their health and the U.S. economy some serious cash. Employees with bad bosses can lose their hair, gain weight and up their chances of heart disease by a whopping 25%. And to top it all off, poorly managed workplaces are less profitable and have lower levels of productivity. Psychopathic bosses: bad for you, bad for the economy.”

The problem is that management is hard, leadership is harder, formal training in either cannot cure personality defects that make being successful in these two endeavors unlikely, and because truly talented managers and leaders are so rare, most people rise to positions of power without ever experiencing what effective leadership is. A good starting point for any boss is a commitment to fairness and respect, as well as an understanding of what responsibility and accountability mean. That, of course, means ethics.

Here is Sarah Wenger’s infographic, “Your Boss is Insane,” re-published with her permission: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Absurdly Warped Priorities of the Incompetent Boy Scouts of America”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Bill, a frequent commenter here whom I am proud to call my friend, contributes this story to the recent post about the Boy Scouts and their negligent handling of pedophiles in the leadership. Here is his Comment of the Day on The Absurdly Warped Priorities of the Incompetent Boy Scouts of America.

“When I was ten years old a man tried to snatch my little brother, who was then seven, off the street. The only thing that stopped this from happening was that the two gay men who lived next store saw it happening, ran out into the street, grabbed my baby brother and apprehended the married pedophile who tried to snatch him. They also gave him a pretty good ass-whipping in the process, as they were both bodybuilders.

“A while later another neighbor asked my father how he could stand living next to those two “faggots” my fathers response was, ‘If it wasn’t for those two men, my youngest son would have been raped and most likely dead. Don’t ever call them faggots in my presence again or question their manhood.’”

“The BSA needs to come into the 21st century and recognize that homosexuality doesn’t equal being a pedophile . That’s is an ignorant and outdated belief and by continuing to follow it they are putting their members at risk.”