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Monday, June 2, 2014

Practical Limit

I always believed that AcMo's innovation potential was unlimited. I guess part of the foundation for that belief was my conviction that my imagination coupled with the brain power of the staff could accomplish anything.  Recent setbacks have me questioning many of the principles I thought were immutable.

We have had a string of lab experiment failures while trying to create future products. We have not yet been able to make our rail gun fire successive shots. The only time that did happen we missed the targets. No one called to tell us there's a new hole in the side of their building, so either our rounds are untraceable, or they didn't hit anything.  We need the rail gun operational to help defend against hostile takeovers. 

The space based portion of our defensive system is not operational because our rockets keep exploding on liftoff.  We have already removed the TGE™ from the engines, but that hasn't made any difference.  We continue to test using model rockets since the real ones are too expensive to blow up at the rate we've been losing them.
  
Our various turbocharger projects have failed to bear fruit up to this point.  In fact, the only successes we've had have been at the track, but that's mostly because we expect failure there and we've been delivering exactly that.

All of this forces me to question everything.  After extensive soul-searching, I've come to the conclusion that I'm the problem.  One of the most important characteristics of a great leader is the ability to surround oneself with smarter people who lack direction.  If you hire smarter, better employees than yourself, and they have direction, you have just created the first stage of your own coup. Congratulations!  

I'm smarter than that.  My people are not organized enough to mount an insurrection, but they may also not be smart enough to fulfill AcMo's vision. There may be a wave of layoffs coming in the next few weeks. Or, I may have to fire myself and start over with a new venture. I'm waiting on the results of my coin toss to decide AcMo's future. 

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