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Politico: 'He's a Performance Artist Pretending to be a Great Manager'
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/hes-a-performance-artist-pretending-to-be-a-great-manager-214836More than 27 years before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, Bruce Nobles, then the president of the Trump Shuttle airline, assessed with some befuddlement the business and managerial practices of his boss. Nobles had climbed a conventional corporate ladder at American, Continental and Pan Am, companies with org charts any MBA would recognize. The Trump Organization, on the other hand, was smaller, looser and much more freewheeling, and working for Trump, Nobles discovered, was a markedly different experience.
“It surprised me how much of a family-type operation it was, instead of a business kind of orientation where there is a structure and there is a chain of command and there is delegation of authority and responsibility,” Nobles told a reporter from Newsday in the fall of 1989. “As the organization gets bigger, and it seems to be getting bigger all the time, he’ll have to do a better job of actually managing the place as opposed to making deals.”
Mere months into Trump’s time as the owner of an airline—the purchase was finalized that June—Nobles already had concerns. Trump had overpaid with more than $400 million of borrowed money, he seemed most interested in cosmetic touches like the size of the “T” on the tails of the planes, and the debt service quickly became crippling. Once, Trump suggested cutting costs by flying with two pilots, not three, and Nobles had to tell him that would be illegal.
Trump’s appetite was greater than his ability to manage what he had acquired. Last week on the phone, as Trump passed the one-month mark in the White House and prepared for tonight’s speech before a joint session of Congress, Nobles told me that what he sees now is what he saw then. “His behavior to date,” he said, “is consistent with the behavior I saw 30 years ago.”
-snip-
“I don’t think there’s anything of scale that he’s had his hands on that he hasn’t made a hash of,” biographer Tim O’Brien said in an interview last week.
-snip-
“He’s not a great manager,” O’Brien said. “He’s a performance artist pretending to be a great manager.”
Trump was at his best as an actual manager, as opposed to as an expert brander or as an effective reality TV star, according to O’Brien, Res and others, more than 30 years ago—when he appeared to know what he didn’t know and hired people who could help him, and then let them do just that. This, they say, was the managerial style that enabled him to erect Trump Tower, which opened in 1983. But some five years later, when Trump’s fame spiked in the wake of the publishing of The Art of the Deal and he tried to branch out and scale up by buying with billions of dollars of borrowed money a third casino in Atlantic City, the Plaza Hotel in New York and the aging fleet of planes so he could own an airline with his name on it, the result was an all-but-fatal business failure. If not for family money, the fact that the banks were as beholden to him as he was to them and the canny wizardry of a lender-mandated chief financial officer—a position he had never had as part of his own staff—Trump almost certainly would have had to declare personal bankruptcy. He might have become ‘80s-era trivia instead of the 45th president.
-snip-
“It surprised me how much of a family-type operation it was, instead of a business kind of orientation where there is a structure and there is a chain of command and there is delegation of authority and responsibility,” Nobles told a reporter from Newsday in the fall of 1989. “As the organization gets bigger, and it seems to be getting bigger all the time, he’ll have to do a better job of actually managing the place as opposed to making deals.”
Mere months into Trump’s time as the owner of an airline—the purchase was finalized that June—Nobles already had concerns. Trump had overpaid with more than $400 million of borrowed money, he seemed most interested in cosmetic touches like the size of the “T” on the tails of the planes, and the debt service quickly became crippling. Once, Trump suggested cutting costs by flying with two pilots, not three, and Nobles had to tell him that would be illegal.
Trump’s appetite was greater than his ability to manage what he had acquired. Last week on the phone, as Trump passed the one-month mark in the White House and prepared for tonight’s speech before a joint session of Congress, Nobles told me that what he sees now is what he saw then. “His behavior to date,” he said, “is consistent with the behavior I saw 30 years ago.”
-snip-
“I don’t think there’s anything of scale that he’s had his hands on that he hasn’t made a hash of,” biographer Tim O’Brien said in an interview last week.
-snip-
“He’s not a great manager,” O’Brien said. “He’s a performance artist pretending to be a great manager.”
Trump was at his best as an actual manager, as opposed to as an expert brander or as an effective reality TV star, according to O’Brien, Res and others, more than 30 years ago—when he appeared to know what he didn’t know and hired people who could help him, and then let them do just that. This, they say, was the managerial style that enabled him to erect Trump Tower, which opened in 1983. But some five years later, when Trump’s fame spiked in the wake of the publishing of The Art of the Deal and he tried to branch out and scale up by buying with billions of dollars of borrowed money a third casino in Atlantic City, the Plaza Hotel in New York and the aging fleet of planes so he could own an airline with his name on it, the result was an all-but-fatal business failure. If not for family money, the fact that the banks were as beholden to him as he was to them and the canny wizardry of a lender-mandated chief financial officer—a position he had never had as part of his own staff—Trump almost certainly would have had to declare personal bankruptcy. He might have become ‘80s-era trivia instead of the 45th president.
-snip-
Two points to add here:
First of all, Trump's early success owed everything not just to his father's money, but to his father's connections. Little Donnie would have gotten nowhere without them.
Second of all, the description of Trump's incompetent management 30 years ago matches what O'Brien described in his 2005 book TrumpNation, especially where he writes about cast members in season 2 of The Apprentice, in 2004, being told they'd get to meet a senior executive with the Trump Organization. Pamela Day, an investment banker who'd graduated from Harvard Business School, told O'Brien they were introduced to Matt Calamari, who they were told was COO, chief operations officer. Calamari had been a security guard whose loyalty to Donald had been well rewarded.
Day asked Calamari what he did there, and asked for an org chart.
Calamari didn't know what an org chart was.
So she asked him, "Who works here?"
Calamari returned with a phone list. Day added that the roster didn't list anyone who was a director of acquisitions, anyone who was a CPA, anyone who was an economist.
"How can a successful company that's this old not have anyone serious doing those jobs?" she asked herself. Deep down inside, she knew the answer to this question. It was because it was Donald's company.
"He's that guy that believes in his own press and drinks his own Kool-Aid and doubles down and then goes bankrupt," she said of Donald.
"How can a successful company that's this old not have anyone serious doing those jobs?" she asked herself. Deep down inside, she knew the answer to this question. It was because it was Donald's company.
"He's that guy that believes in his own press and drinks his own Kool-Aid and doubles down and then goes bankrupt," she said of Donald.
And now this incompetent is the most powerful man in the world.
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