OMB Director Mike Mulvaney Is Here From Downtown

He's here from Mitch and Murray.

H/T Tengrain for this True Tale from the Annals of Shitty 1990s Management Fads!

All of which you should go read right now.

Here's the creamy nougat center:

You’re Fired!

...

And then we get to the fun part with ol’ Mick Mulvaney: he thinks that cutting the federal workforce will be good for the morale of the departments:

A reporter asked Mulvaney about the morale of federal workers: “How are you addressing that? Because I think what’s going to happen is employees are going to get depressed.”

“They shouldn’t be,” Mulvaney responded. “And here’s one of frustrations that government workers have, is that we don’t reward those who do a really good job, and we don’t punish those who do a lousy job.  …”That is one of the things we’ve asked the agencies to look at: How do you restructure your personnel policies in order to point out people who are doing a great job and figuring out a way to get folks who are not delivering money for the taxpayer, get them on board with whatever it is — whatever policy you’re trying to achieve.”

This was called "Yank and Rank" back in the Age of Enron.

Anyone remember how that worked out?

Anyone?

From Boing Boing:

Documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

In the new documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Enron CEO Jeffery Skilling is portrayed as kind of "incandescently brilliant" cult leader espousing a bizarre Darwinist ideology.

Skilling's favorite book is Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which isn't a bizarre book by any means, but Skilling took the ideas of Dawkins-style Darwinism to a new level by instituting a performance review policy at Enron that worked like a genetic algorithm for people. Every year, all employees were rated from 1 (best) to 5 (worst). The more money you made for the company, the better your rating. (Skilling was fond of saying that money was the only thing that motivated people). Skilling mandated that between 10 and 15 percent of the employees had to be rated as 5s. And to get a rating of 5 meant that you were fired. This review process was dubbed "rank and yank."

It's no surprise that this algorithm resulted in a corporate petri dish teeming with sociopaths who were taped in phone conversations laughing at the thought of stealing money from "grandma millies" who were hit with unafforably high utility bills, and urging on the California wildfires by chanting "burn baby, burn!."...