Thursday, May 14, 2009

In my Humble Opinion:

In my humble opinion Donald Trump the world a great disservice to the business world other day by hiring Joan Rivers as his apprentice.

Truth be told I was never too found of Joan Rivers, it was more of a gut feeling than any rooted behavior. The surgically embellished face and that creepy daughter who was never too far way, didn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

Her behaviour on the Apprentice validated my initial feelings. Insolent, rude, and crazy, the woman seemed to be able to say and do what she liked simply because she was Joan Rivers. To her credit during the show she did come up with many great ideas. Yet her erratic and irrational behaviour muddled any good that came out of her. And her daughter’s behaviour is further testament to bad social behaviour being passed on.

Now listen these two are on TV they have nothing to do with me…so why write about them? Well by DT, (who while pompous, does come across as quite level headed on the show,) selecting Joan as the apprentice, despite her ludicrous behaviour, he further imbedded misguided corporate theory on acceptable behaviour.

In university these days most business courses have a chapter on ethics. In the real world ethics go out of the window. My recent experiences at work have taught me that it really doesn’t matter how people treat other people at work as long as you make good on the two golden rules:
You make the corporation money or at least make a great show of pretending that you do
You don’t ‘knowingly’ do anything illegal

I get it. I get that if your good outweighs your bad, people tend to look at your good. In a corporation that good, is a return on investment. Yet I challenge this misguided conventional wisdom with the thought: by letting people get away with bad managerial behaviour don’t you just propagate the problem? Instead of nipping it in the bud, so that the person can learn and become better, you exacerbate the problem. The problem with the premise is that good leadership and productivity are opposing ideas. And we all know that it just ain’t the truth.

Here’s my call to action: Expect more people: expect more from your leaders, expect more from yourselves, expect more from your work place….

Because I have a feeling if they we as a collective said that people screaming at other people in the name of making money isn’t right….we’d actually make a change.

6 comments:

Dee said...

wow
you sound like President Obama addressing the graduation class at ASU last nite
good one though--you are right. People who behave badly should not be rewarded with raises, more vacation, and other perks--but tell that to big banking. . .

Unknown said...

I agree GC, Cranky for Prime Minister!!!

Welcome to the world we live in Cranky, people without ethics, bad social behaviour and are corrupt are the ones who get ahead and get praised.

Abeni said...

Do you remember when Joan and Melissa used to be on the red carpet critiquing fashion? That was always hilarious to me given their creep appearances.

Anyway,the world seems to love boorish behaviour so there's a market.

Jdid said...

I agree with you wholeheartedly. It sucks what some staff have to put up with from managers.

good leadership should work hand in hand with productivity but really there arent alot of good leaders out there

The Ambiguous Blob said...

I was in a marketing class recently with a professor that told it like it is in the REAL world. He told the class stories about completely unethical behavior that made him a ton of money and earned respect from his leadership.
After one such story, a classmate spoke up:
When do we talk about ethics in this course?

To which the professor answered:
That's week 7.

We only had 6 weeks of class.

-r|e|w- said...

Gee this is one of my favorite shows, and i loved this season.
I have to Disagree with you on your main issue, I believe Joan Rivers was the best choice especially between the two finalist.
I think you misunderstood her attitude and mistaken brashness for rudeness. She is str8 forward and tells it as it is, no secrets. This i find vary respectful as opposed to Anne Dukes' manipulating two faced sly character.

In the real world, it cannot be all about making money. That is the fundamental reason why we are in this great recession, because people wanted to make money without any moral inclination or guidance to their actions. Joan said it herself that you cant just snatch money because its going to hurt the ones you take it from. And i believe inevitably it might hurt you.

Ethics in business is extremely important for markets to work for long term results. but people are short sighted, they cannot foresee the implications of their greedy actions.

I think Donald understood this because he understands the greed, shortsightedness and unethical behavior that dominated the corporate structure, and that is why he predicted the economic collapse. When it came down to choosing, he would only be contradicting himself, and setting horrible precedence if he was to reward Dukes' unethical style. It was the ultimate triumph of Good vs Evil in my opinion.