Concerted Procrastination is an accepted and well worn decision-making practice among senior executives in all venues -- government, business, NPOs. The theory is that, if you can wait long enough, difficult problems will resolve themselves when all options have been reduced to the worst one by default. Then the 'decision' is inevitable, and often unarguable.
I,too, though not a senior executive by any means, have practiced it on occasion, most recently in relation to forming my personal opinion on the efficacy of the Government assisting the US auto industry to a soft landing.
It seemed imprudent, if not irresponsible, to advocate pulling the plug on the US auto companies without having some credible sense of the collateral damage that might ensue, and a strategy to deal with it. Mind you, I am not so concerned about the auto companies themselves as the consequence of their failure to others dependent upon them but not responsible for their self-inflicted wounds.
But today my dilemma was resolved with news that GM has built into its taxpayer financed recovery plan the intent of importing cars to the US from its Chinese plants. Granted, the number of units are immaterial over the first three years. Just as the cost of corporate jets to fly its former CEO to Washington was immaterial to GM's financial situation when it begged Congress for deliverance. But to conceive this as an element of its recovery, while it triggers the demise of its own employee/taxpayers suggests such terminal institutional stupidity that it is clearly beyond rescue.
Pull the plug. Walk away. And be sure to turn out the lights on the way out the door.
R.I.P. G.M.
Onward
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