Quote:
Originally Posted by bigbucks24
OK. So I've been trying to build this house for years. I hired a contractor and he build part of the house but it looked like shit and was ready to fall down. He told me he would have to tear it down and start again. So I let him and a year later, he had built nothing. So I fired him and brought in a new contractor. He was a pretty famous carpenter and had won some Carpenter of the Year awards so I figured he'd be a good contractor. Afterall, he knows what the heck he's doing. He told me it would be a long process to build a great house and that I should be patient. I was excited as hell. Award winning, great contractor was going to build me an awesome house. 11 months later, I look at my lot and nothign is build. No foundation, no studs, nothing. In fact, most of the crap from the last contractor was still there, lying around. He had hauled a couple of piles of trash away, but he had also throw away some stuff that I thought he could have used. I asked him what was going on. He told me, "It takes awhile to get the lay of the land. Afterall, I wasn't here last year. All I had was pictures of the lot and blueprints from the last contractor." "Besides" he tells me, "I had to move my family and set up a new company, find an office, hire a secretary, buy a computer and more stuff." I guess the first year was just about getting things going and getting a feel for my land. Should I have expected more out of my amazing contractor?
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I love analogies. Let me play around. What if the contractor you hired had several electricians on that staff who were known for sloppy work? Or carpenters who were known to be so sloppy that they spent more time correcting mistakes rather than building things. My response would be: "get those guys the **** away from my foundation." The secretaries, staff, etc... are one thing. But your specialists like carpenters? I want the right guys for the job. Otherwise I'll spend way more time fixing their mistakes. But the analogy is also flawed. I would never hire the guy in the first place until he had a staff in place and if I did, shame on me. The NFL and corporate America doesn't have that luxury.
The more appropriate analogy is a company like GM. Let's assume it's 2008. Before they declared bankruptcy. There are two approaches to fixing GM. You can take a shotgun approach, immediately act on pressing issues, and adjust later if you make mistakes. Or... you can take it slow, think through the problem, prioritize your strategies, and get the right people in place before you roll in fast forward. In most of corporate America, they use the latter approach. At GM, do you want the same idiots who screwed the company up to be the ones who are also helping you dig the company out of the grave? And given the bureaucracy of the company, don't you want the entire company working under the same vision as opposed to your operations guys focusing on cutting costs, your finance guys focusing on growing the company, and your marketing guys focusing on more expensive customer service? There are lots of great ways to immediately bump up the stock price, but the only way to get the company moving is to get the entire organization to move in one specific vision and to have the foundation and structure to make things happen.
And if you're an accountability guy like Pioli, do you want a bunch of scouts on your staff who don't care about deadlines, were never really pushed hard to have relentless work ethics, and maybe aren't the most talented guys you would hire for yourself?
I really don't care that we didn't make a big splash in the free agency market last year. I don't mind taking it slow. But that being said, he has to earn our trust that he knows what he's doing and it has to happen this offseason.