The biggest job a leader has to do is prioritize. You can’t do everything well. You need to determine what is the top 5 or 6 things you need to focus your time on to meet the 5 or 6 results that determine your success or failure as a leader.
Let’s see. We have a jobs problem that has existed since the present leader took over. It’s the same 7.9% as it was when he took office. Does gun control resolve unemployment? Don’t think so.
Then we have this little issue of spending a couple trillion a year more than we bring in with revenue. Gun control part of that?
Defense budgets are going to be cut with sequestration. Maybe this is a good thing since the Defense Department spent a few million to have a float in the Rose Parade. Remember the $100 toilet seat fiasco years ago. No one believes the Defense Department is an efficient contractor, especially me, since I used to sell them jet fuel. Maybe they could do the same job for less money and pay the troops more. But, gun control will only fix this if private citizens give their banned automatic weapons to the military, thus saving the military from buying a few million guns.
The biggest part of the spending problem is entitlements. Not really entitlements, since we paid into our Social Security and Medicare, but that’s what they are called. They are also called the third rail of politics. Will gun control fix this?
For his first four years in office, this president has not presented a budget. He will now promote the budget director who didn’t prepare a budget to Treasury Secretary. Will he name a new budget director who doesn’t make a budget? Is the budget director working on gun control along with the Vice President? If you need to control spending is a budget a good place to start?
If you were on the Board of Directors of USA, Inc. and Mr. Obama was the CEO, how would you establish his priorities? Keeping us safe is a given. That’s a” do that or lose your job” goal, right? After that, the performance on jobs for the past four years has been unacceptable. So, that’s got to improve. And, the little matter of cash flow must be addressed. How about a minute or two on the USPS which lost a new record amount last year? Basically, if your CEO got the GDP back to normal levels, got unemployment down to acceptable levels, and began to fix the cash flow problem, he would be considered a good leader, right?
How does gun control right out of the box for the first two weeks of the new year make your feel about his leadership? No one is happy that we have these outbreaks of violence like Newtown. But, we did have an automatic weapons ban before and it didn’t work. And, there is that little matter of violence in the movies and on TV. My wife and I went to see Gang Squad and there were thousands of rounds of automatic weapons fire along with a guy being pulled apart by two vehicles. Sean Penn was the bad guy. No doubt a big proponent of gun control.
You see, I’m not against putting in some weapons controls in to try to keep kids from being killed by mentally ill people. But, I see this as a Middle Manager job. Not one that takes so much time from the CEO who is failing on the key objectives. But, we hired him. He works for us. As long as we keep hiring people who work on things that are jazzy and exciting and easy to do, but add up to nothing, that’s what they will work on. Easy and jazzy are key there.
Until someone demands that our leaders focus on our real problems, we aren’t going to get results. We are the Board of Directors and we are failing. Failing the shareholders, our grand kids.
