The professor is way cool
We registered for this seminar, and it was really great. It had all kinds of grad students in it and everything. But the best part was the professor. He was really smart and everything and very handsome in that blue tie. Here’s what he said after we spent the afternoon dialoging and building new friendships in our break-out sessions (some of the students were really old — yuck!):
I understand you guys had great breakout sessions…I want to just provide a few opening remarks, and then I’ll just open it up for questions and comments. The idea here was to bring everybody together because it’s been a long time since we had this conversation…
I want to make sure that the conversation doesn’t end when we go home today. We’ve got a lot of hard choices to make, we need to build off this afternoon’s conversation and work together to forge a consensus. So one of the things that I’m hoping to do is that my team, each of whom were taking copious notes during the course of these respective breakout sessions, will issue a report or a summary of the conversation.
It will be distributed to each of the participants in those respective discussions. We will then ask for concrete ideas, either about substance or process, and we will ask that you get those back so that we can then issue a final report coming out of this conversation in 30 days.
We all agreed that we were really enthusiastic about seeing this report in 30 days and then discussing “substance or process” or whatever some more. This course looks like an easy A — except for this guy, who might get a B cause he fell asleep in class.
We understand that this fiscal summit was show, not substance, a mere Potemkin village of consensus building designed to beguile the media and true believers. If charades like this are the silly way Obama intends to govern, it’s going to be a very long four years indeed.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:56 am
I think they called this “Organizational Effectiveness” circa 1990.
Good Lord.
February 25th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Very funny. As I read it, I was hoping it was what I thought it was. Excellent satire/mockery. It’s sad that this is what our goverment wonks are doing… Hope Change Change…. discuss
February 25th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
The suit is empty… The emperor has no clothes in reverse.
Unfortunately, this guy, along with San Fran Nan, are working on the reenactment of the Fall of the Roman Empire. To be presented before the mid-term elections…
February 25th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Didn’t last night’s speech solve all our problems? I expect the DOW to open at 10,000 and rise to 12,000 by Friday’s close. We are saved. All our population will be college graduates. Bad teachers will be laid off. I can see unicorns and rainbows already.
Then I woke up and went to work, remembering that the unindicted conspirators responsible for this mess were still in Congress and have learned nothing.
February 25th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
D,
I went through a couple of these training courses. They were usually called ‘Team Buildng’ exercises in the UK.
The ‘coping mechanism’ for a ‘breakout’ group is quite simple though, just breakout to some tables near the hotel bar.
Dinocrat,
Your post is a good replica of the thoughts going through my mind as I watched the televised part of the Summit.
The next 4 years may seem very long but the degree to which Obama seeks consensus is a great positive. Such an inherent brake on ‘progress’. The landscape, I suspect, will be little changed come November 2012.
‘Mutatis Mutandis’ really.
February 25th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
my reaction as well…although they way the teacher was praised seemed more along the lines of a kindergarten class.