You Can’t Fix Stupid, But You Can Try To Head Off Its Ill Effects
By
Leonard Zwelling
Perhaps there was no more important moment in my development as an administrator than when my office was searching for a new manager who would assist the Office of Research Administration in grant writing and in interacting with the various other critical offices in the institution. By that time, I had a group of about five managers who reported directly to me. All of them were women. All of them were excellent at their jobs.
Human Resources sent us several candidates for the open position. One in particular stuck out for me. She was very polished, well-dressed, well-spoken, and belonged to a minority group of which there were no other representatives among my managers.
All of managers, my Associate Vice President and I interviewed all the candidates. I was really stuck on the candidate I described above. To a woman, all of my mangers advised me against hiring her. They did no like her and thought she was not trustworthy. Stupidly, I hired her anyway. Very quickly, I learned that all my managers had been right and this person never worked out in our office or anywhere else at Anderson.
The lesson here is not that I did some stupid things as a Vice President. I did. The lesson is that not listening to those who have your best interest in mind when advising you is truly stupid. Great staff, and my managers were fantastic, can save you from doing something stupid.
And, as far as I can tell, this is what happened during Trump 1.0. During Trump’s first term in office, he surrounded himself with highly skilled, very intelligent advisors who were constantly talking him out of doing stupid things. It did not work every time. His management of Covid was poor, but Operation Warp Speed was very beneficial to our country. Despite what MAGA World believes, Tony Fauci did what he could to formulate a response to the Covid threat, but he too was ill-advised, I believe, with regard to the arbitrary six-foot distance rule, the external wiping down of groceries, and certainly the closing of schools. Fauci is no villain, but he did make some big mistakes.
In Trump 2.0, the President is surrounded by a combination of ninnies and yes men. Just as my managers predicted disaster if I took the action to hire the candidate they advised against, most Middle East experts (that DOES NOT include Marco Rubio, JD Vance, Jared Kushner, or Steve Witkoff), predicted the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian missile and drone attacks on other Arab countries, the continued control of the Iranian people by the Revolutionary Guard, and the survival of the mullahs in power if Mr. Trump attacked Iran by air.
On a recent radio report, I heard that prior to the war, Bibi Netanyahu was invited into the Situation Room of the White House where no one but the closest of presidential confidantes belong. Bibi had Mossad convince Trump that air power bombing of Iran would lead to an uprising of the Iranian people against the theocracy. How stupid do you have to be to believe that? Pretty stupid given the Iranian people have no guns. I guess no one around Trump knew enough to say “that is BS.”
Closer to home, I am watching with ever increasing amusement some of the projects in which the current leader of MD Anderson is involved.
The Kinder Children’s Cancer Hospital sounds like a great idea on paper, but merging the oncology service at Texas Children’s and Pediatrics at MD Anderson had been on the table for years. There’s a reason it never went anywhere. The cultures were not able to be merged and the faculty salary differentials have to be overcome somehow. That needed to be worked out before a single patient or MD Anderson doctor moved across the street after the announcement of the current “merger,” but the $150 million must have clouded the brains at the top of Anderson all the way to Austin. I am not at all convinced this will become a good idea without a lot of faculty and patient strife. I am not even convinced that it will ever happen. The hospital may get built and MD Anderson’s red line may be on the building, but the heart and soul of MD Anderson Pediatrics may be gone for good, acquired by not merged with TCH.
MD Anderson in Austin started out as a free-standing hospital downtown. It has now been absorbed into the new Dell Hospital to the northwest. What exactly will MD Anderson in Austin be? I am quite certain it will not be 1515 Holcombe in The Domain. And who will really run MD Anderson Austin? Dr. Pisters or the leader of the Dell Hospital?
Finally, a new 25-story clinic building is going up at the corner of Fannin and Holcombe. The last thing the Texas Medical Center needs is more cars that have to get to yet another clinical building and somehow find a place to park.
All this building will necessitate raising billions of dollars and another MD Anderson in-patient clinical structure is also planned and SCRB 5 is to be opened as well. This is at a time when federal money for research is drying up. If money were being raised to protect the creative work of the investigators at Anderson, I would be the first one cheering from the sidelines. But if all of the money raised by the Development Office is going into bricks and mortar, research-driven patient care at Anderson may be a distant memory very shortly.
I don’t know who is advising Dr. Pisters. I know during the limited time he allowed me to advise him, he didn’t listen to a thing I said. I hope he has some smart people around him who prevent him from doing anything stupid, but it may be too late for that and knowing who is around him, I don’t think the Mensa crowd is in his ear.
Both Trump and Pisters are getting themselves way over their heads in morasses that are of their own making. Good staff, when consulted, can help leaders avoid such fiascoes. The Iran War is only the latest in a string of Trump fiascoes from the East Wing of the White House to the pool of the National Mall. I fear the many building projects of Peter Pisters may turn out to be the same for MD Anderson.
When John Mendelsohn was MD Anderson president, it was said that “buildings are Mendelsohn’s crack.” (That came from one of his Executive VPs.) All of these building projects may be fentanyl for Pisters. There ought to be a 12-step program for ill-advised leaders caught up in construction projects as the manifestation of their legacies. Or, better yet, we could hope for fewer ill-advised leaders.
