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My preceding article on the Hastert Rule generated a lot of comment. Some readers felt I was unfairly picking on one specific political party. I wasn't. Rather, I was making a point about current political practice.
A related point that needs to be made is that when politics is conducted more in line with effective business practices, it produces better results. If businessmen don't work together to produce positive business impacts, they get replaced. Unfortunately, our elected representatives (who are currently receiving an approval rating in the 10% range) continue to get re-elected, time after time, regardless of congressional accomplishment-go figure.
One element of effective business practice (which I have written extensively about in past columns) revolves around finding the middle ground, which also applies in politics. In that last article I was trying to show that individual politicians (regardless of their true feelings) may have difficulty representing their constituents due to artificial boundaries that have been put in place. I used the Hastert Rule to make this point since it is probably the most highly visible such boundary and it has led to recent negative impacts relative to the lapse in reauthorizing the Import-Export Bank.
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Even though there was a certain amount of pushback about featuring a rule associated with a specific political party as the example of how not to conduct effective politics, no one actually came forward and tried to defend the Hastert Rule. I believe that shining-a-light on such practices is the first step needed to getting them removed and/or revised so at least now I can check that action off of my list relative to that specific rule. Make no mistake about it: The Hastert Rule is very bad medicine.
Don't think that similar anti-middle ground "rules" don't occur in business. When I worked in corporate America I had to work to operate with them in mind, the...