While Secretary of State Rex Tillerson feuds with Ivanka Trump, things inside his State Department continue to look a bit grim.
The senior official charged with remaking the State Department in Secretary Rex Tillerson’s image has resigned after three months on the job, an agency spokesman confirmed to NBC on Monday.
That official, Maliz Beams, is bailing out; now the "Redesign" effort will apparently be tossed onto Tillerson's Deputy Chief of Staff, Christine Ciccone. As of yet the only notable "Redesign" outcomes are (1) that Rex Tillerson still isn't operating with a full staff and (2) nonpartisan State officials are fleeing the agency at a brisk pace. This is all part of the plan, says the administration. What the United States needs is a bigger military and considerably fewer diplomats.
In general, when a nation begins to build up its military forces while simultaneously culling its ranks of diplomats and negotiators, we consider that a Bad Thing. We generally call the foreign leaders who do such things rude names, and put those nations on official lists of various sorts. But no matter.
For months, the nation's papers have been reporting on morale problems, resignations, staffing failures, and other turmoil in the State Department. This, right here, demonstrates how far above his head Rex Tillerson is:
Tillerson, for his part, has denied that spirits at the department are low.
“I walk the halls, people smile,” he told Bloomberg in October. “If it’s as bad as it seems to be described, I’m not seeing it, I’m not getting it.”
But this is the very definition of a bad manager.
His organization is in such turmoil as to regularly make the morning papers and national news programs; he dismisses it by claiming he, personally, sees no such thing. This is the essence of managerial incompetence. The building is falling down around him, and the man in charge says well, everything must be fine, because the people whose careers I hold in my hand are polite to me when I walk down the halls. If you have never known an executive like that, in your own career, count yourself lucky; many of the nation’s largest companies staff their senior offices exclusively with such dullards. Then, a decade later, someone finally writes a book about how this or that once-successful company was brought to its knees by a dozen or so dimwits, and other executives rush to recommend it to their friends to demonstrate that they would never, no never, make the same mistakes.
There are going to be books written about Tillerson's failures here. They will be big, important-sounding books about management advice and what not to do, with lots of individual chapters featuring interviews with dozens of underlings who knew exactly what was going on but couldn't get the boss's ear, and inside gossip on the executive who could not stand up to his own plainly incompetent and destructive boss but surely regretted it every moment, and by the time Rex Tillerson returns to private life he's going to find the job market for obtuse billionaire chief executives ain't what it used to be.
Then he’ll be put in charge of Hewlett Packard, probably.