Huffington Post captured it a headline.
The sycophantic behavior of grown successful men behaving like contestants on the Apprentice in a video orchestrated by the President at a cabinet meeting was embarrassing.
Its hard to parody people behaving as if in a parody. It made Zimbabwean praise singers blush. Was this actually a National Lampoon movie?
But thinking it through it reminded me of an event 60 years ago--a non-political event that has lived on as an exemplar of bad design, thinking and planning. It was approved by men who knew better but worked in a management subservient to the boss, whose family name is the brand. We are talking the Edsel, a car that met exactly none of Henry Ford II’s objectives.
I clearly remember finding some on a transporter headed to a dealer. It was ugly: Buyers also found it overpriced, and overhyped. Before killing it in just three years, Ford lost around $300 million, which in today’s dollars would be $3 billion. But that’s not the point here.
All of these cabinet officers claim to have been successful in their own careers. Most are extremely wealthy. We tend to equate success and money with being smart. Their behavior at the cabinet session is proof that this is a false equivalency.
In the arc of history the Edsel failure was an insignificant catastrophe. The Trump Administration’s potential failings will have a greater global impact.