Corporate speak comes to Trudeaupia:
For the time he was available, Mr. Mendelsohn explained how, in a nutshell, his results-and-delivery role is about ensuring departments are clear on their goals, that they have their operations structured in such a way to achieve stated objectives, and that measurements are regularly taken to assess progress.
“It includes being really relentless about measuring progress in your success and seeing whether you are achieving your goals or objectives or purposes, and recalibrating or readjusting if you’re not,” Mr. Mendelsohn said.
Those of us who have worked for large corporations - especially those poor bastards who have worked at HQ - will feel their skins crawl at such mindless chatter. When we on the Right talk about introducing a greater private sector mentality into government operations this is not what we mean. When Justin's "Deliverology" guru speaks this way he is importing the worst aspects of private enterprise into government: Inane office politics.
The point of corporate speak isn't to communicate information, it's to spin information in a manner pleasing to the executive leadership. In other words it's importing the worst aspects of government into the private sector. What Mr Mendelsohn is doing isn't "delivering results" but pretending to deliver results. Most likely Comrade Gerald realized that while ordinary Canadians were enamoured with Justin's luscious locks and superb boxing skills, they will eventually realize the Prime Minister is an immature lightweight who has never held a real job.
Part of the image making process is spinning against your weaknesses. Margaret Thatcher was perceived as soft and incapable of leadership simply because she was a woman. Her handlers skillfully trained her voice, dress and manners to seem just a little more masculine without her coming off as butch. Stephen Harper was perceived as a heartless accountant ready to crush the poor underfoot - if only - so they dressed him in fluffy blue sweaters and forced him warble out Beatles hits on an old piano. Since Justin Trudeau is Zoolander without the intellectual subtly and depth, his handlers are desperately trying to portray him as the second coming of Frederick Winslow Taylor.
It will fail. Miserably. But between now and then will be an eternity in Canadian politics.
Saying that you are "relentless about measuring progress" is meaningless in politics and government. All organizations establish some type of metric to evaluate their success at achieving designated goals. These are however internal metrics. A CEO might very well establish a series of metrics in order to make the organization "lean and mean." Whether those metrics have any relation to objective reality is not consequent on the employees having met the metrics. A organization is successful if it's clients think it has met their needs properly. Since this is rather complicated - and often takes years to do well - many CEOs just fake it and hope to make it. They establish impressive sounding goals and high sounding metrics, while on the backend manipulate the calculations to produce the desired results.
I have worked for corporations where the key metrics were - for all intents - utterly random. At first I assumed that I was missing something, that there was some hidden method in the madness. And so there was. The method was not to properly evaluate the performance of employees, but to create an arbitrary process which could be interpreted any which way the managers and executives wanted. Star performers could never consistently meet their goals and so never get a good bonus. Utter incompetents would have brilliant quarters followed by terrible results, which in turn would require more "coaching" resources from other departments. Since it was impossible to accurately predicate anyone's results the managers could promote, fire and punish almost with impunity simply by cherry picking the random results. As most of the employees were fairly daft and cowardly none of this metrical legerdemain was ever tested in court.
I doubt Team Trudeau is intelligent enough to establish something so cynically clever, yet it gives you an idea of how pointless most metrics truly are even in the private sector. The only metric that matters in business over the long run is profits. Any activity which cannot be directly linked to the bottom line is a waste. By creating a series of false metrics the executive leadership can muddle the issue to hide their failures and incompetence. The key difference is that the private sector is subject - more or less given our highly regulated mix economy - to the discipline of the market. Government is subject only to the whim of a largely disengaged, over taxed and poorly educated electorate. Deliverology is Trudeaupian kabuki theatre without the pretty costumes. What remains is the ugly lie of modern government and its cynical operators.
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