Harvard Professor on Rick Wagoner

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/kanter/2009/03/transform-or-die.html

My response to the Professor:

Professor Kanter,

While agreeing with you on the failure of Wagoner, I echo the points above on the issue of government control, and it's biased approach of determining winners and losers, being a far greater threat than Chrysler failing. With all its faults, there once existed a mechanism to reward or penalize the decisions of company leadership, it was called the market. Millions of people make millions of evaluations on the performance of companies. We now have a neo-Brain Trust, lead by someone who's never run anything for profit, guiding the ship.

If we apply your thinking above toward Wagoner, and replace it with Obama, it will give a window into a forthcoming article in November of 2012.

"Even when Presidents who presided over a period of decline admit mistakes, it is nearly impossible for them to stir up the national energy needed for a turnaround. Those failed leaders symbolize the weight of past losses. People tend to interpret their actions as self-justifying, chosen to rewrite past history. After all, if the President had wrong ideas in the past, why should people believe he or she has the right idea now? For Obama, as the problems got worse, the loss figures got bigger, and little else appeared to change, his credibility slipped into the negative zone too."