Backed Into A Corner

The government of the United States is broken. The whole world knows this including the Senators and Representatives who are the cause. It’s fascinating to watch a collection of supposed leaders back themselves into one corner after the other due to their egos, their belief in their own genius and correctness on everything, and their unbelievable rigidity of belief in things where the people they govern have vast diversity of views.

Sadly it’s not only themselves that are hurt by this. The United States and the entire world are negatively impacted by the spectacle and paralysis that results.

The latest incident is over funding for Homeland Security. Rather than pass a clean unencumbered bill that would certainly pass, the Republicans in charge added overturning Obama’s immigration policy to the bill. The Democrats and President Obama are united in opposing this. Result? Speaker Boehner has announced he’ll let Homeland Security go unfunded rather than separate the two issues.

All parties are so interested in showing everyone how tough and unflinching they are in the rightness of their beliefs that they’ll hold the security of the United States hostage. Even worse, they’ll let the funding lapse and thus security decrease so they get a few sound bites.

And they call themselves leaders.

Watching this horror show unfold got me thinking about similar behavior in the business world. Often we see someone so caught up in themselves that they ignore the destructive results of their actions. They are guided by their own beliefs to the exclusion of any evidence to the contrary.

Actually, they don’t get evidence to the contrary since they’ve build a moat around themselves guarded by sycophants. No contradictory information or ideas are allowed to enter. No dialogue with the unbelievers is allowed and the thought they might be stuck in a corner is never expressed.

Sometimes this leads to failure, sometimes just to poor performance, but always to results that are less than they could be. Certainly there are a few exceptions to this which are often touted as a reason for dictatorship. These exceptions are few and far between which is why we always hear about the same few people. For most of us, and probably for you, the moat leads to less rather than more.

Sometimes the results are so horrific that they affect the world much as the current government dysfunction does. Everyone suffers. Think what the big banks brought upon us all and the suffering that resulted.

And they thought of themselves as the smartest people around. How wide was their moat?

How wide is your moat?