From a leadership standpoint, failure can be a wonderful teacher, yet failure denied cements problems in place, for which insurance conglomerate AIG is the latest and most toxic poster child.
Take a look at results: AIG is producing no new ideas/strategies, no new public value (in fact, just the opposite), and no tangible success or achievement in the marketplace. In short, the company is brain dead, and has been for a number of years. Between the debates about “what do we do about the $165 million failure bonus payments” and the repeated bailouts, we are feeding it through a tube that doesn’t seem to be connected to anyone or anything.
Let's cut to the chase, declare AIG to be in a chronic, vegetative state, and try a new intervention: acceptance, change in leadership, strategic plan, transparent restructuring, track progress versus this new plan, and hold leadership accountable. The classics.
Instead, given the current congressional hearings and media chest-thumping, we have pitched a jumbo "party tent" in denial about the death of AIG's current incarnation, and are therefore complicit in preventing it's future from unfolding, whatever that may need to look like.
While another AIG public and financial spanking is in order, the question about what to do with the bonus payments is a sideshow—political and optical “hay-making,” taking time and energy from the bigger issues:
- If AIG in its current form is simply dead, is it REALLY true that we can’t pull the plug, because if it goes it will take what remains of our economy with it?
- Does AIG have a do-able future as a reconfigured / restructured company?
If not, what's needed to stop wasting time and shoot the horse?
If so, what should that look like?
- If there is an immediate roadmap / plan / strategy for the company, what is it? How can that be made public?
- Who’s leading it – as 80% “owner,” is the U.S. Government in charge? Are we all in charge?
The White House (first Bush, now Obama), Fed, Treasury, and Congress all seem to feel that the company is “too big / too important to fail.” Yet fail it has already done, and continuing our current thinking and approach is the definition of insanity: repeating the same behavior and awaiting / hoping for a different result.
If AIG’s death will take us down with it, then let’s get the public spanking over and done, accept that the current course of “treatment” has failed, appoint someone with a brain to run it on our behalf, and head into a very transparent and participative restructuring.
Tick tock.
