The woman in the picture seems to be working really hard to be selling something. Se seems to be too old to be attractive as a bride and first time mother. Below the neck, she seems to have a good female figure. But her face is a bit long and strong, really, too much to have her be very pretty or, really, even very feminine. With that facial expression, posture, and clothes, she doesn’t look like one to bring home to the family, give a ring, and plan a good family with children and grand children.

Looks to me like she has some serious problems between her ears; she looks like she has a stack of business cards from some of the most aggressive divorce lawyers. Get involved with her, should be well lawyered up.

Marriage? Would need one heck of a pre-nup, and then would still likely be fighting all the time — not good, really, big mistake.

She looks like a house, car, whatever, that’s been on the market way too long and, thus, likely has some serious faults, a car with a bad main bearing, a house that gets two feet of water in the basement several times a year.

Net, if she were good wife material, she should long since have been off the market, in a good marriage and home, with several kids by now.

The picture of the soldiers looks like it is from the TV series of the Stephen E. Ambrose Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. when, near the end, they were accepting the surrender of some Germans and in particular a German officer who gave a parting speech to his men that made him looks astoundingly competent and professional. I’d check this guess, but all my YouTube URLs of the TV series are dead!

When I was in organizations — business, academics, government — I saw a lot that was really bad, and nearly all of it could be summarized as just dysfunctional and as bad as a sick and dirty pig. Then, sorry, those nice ideas would have been like lipstick on that pig.

Maybe if the organization had used those ideas from the beginning it wouldn’t have been a sick and dirty pig and, actually, deserving of the lipstick. Maybe. Hopefully.

Some of what I saw:

(1) Theft by the janitors each night going through any unlocked office desks to find and steal change kept for the vending machines and up to the high managers selling off supplies and inventory, e.g., copper tubing, for cash. Anyone who tried to report any case of theft was banished.

I can guess that some local plumbing supply house had a really nice source of supply!

Maybe the head guy of the division with the inventory had a neighbor in the plumbing supply business, met at a neighborhood BBQ, heard the plumbing guy complain about the high wholesale cost of copper tubing, and have the manager say that they had a lot of “surplus copper tubing they wanted to sell off cheap” or some such.

(2) Got to be in the clique — ethnic, religious, racial, gender, sexual orientation, whatever — or will be there just to be quiet, lay low, see nothing, say nothing, do very little, and fill in the bottom of the rankings as just another “poor performer”. To help enforce this, there were strict rules on communications paths: Could communicate with others outside own hierarchy sub-tree only through own supervisor. Any nail that stuck up got beaten down flat.

(3) Are hired to be fired so that the hiring manager can claim that need to hire still better people and pay them more money so that the hiring manager, to make, say, 15% more than their best paid subordinate, can get paid more money.

(4) Better ideas are a threat: The organization was run like, say, an early Ford manufacturing plant where the supervisor knew more and the subordinates were there just to add muscle to the work of the supervisor. Anyone with a better idea that could be important for the company scared the pants off everyone in the management chain up to and including the CEO and maybe even the BoD since such ideas and the person could be seen as a threat, a threat to the whole management chain if they stayed in the company and a threat to the company from outside the company.

(5) Inwardly directed: Fight others in the company, especially on the same floor or hall, and ignore everything outside the company. Reinforce this with a lot of arrogance.

(6) Process oriented: Use various cases of formal, maybe intricate and/or inscrutable, processes as a means to protect management. Reinforce this with a lot of arrogance.

(7) Vendor kickbacks: Have some high manager buy overpriced equipment, supplies, and services to get personal kickbacks from the vendors.

A lot of such dysfunctional rot in the literature of organizational behavior, public administration, etc. is called goal subordination. It’s very well known stuff.

Now that I understand such ways, maybe among the millions of ways to go wrong, at this point I still don’t know good ways to stop such dysfunctional stuff. Maybe the best way is good leadership as from BRC here and as from a winning B-ball team where each player has to pass the ball to the player with the best shot, that is, play for the team instead of just for their own performance numbers. Maybe a well trained military unit is similar. Maybe.

http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/big-red-rules-2017-ii-edition-ceos/

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com