Commentary: Sure Things Lost and Lessons Learned

By Mike Phillips

One day, back in my corporate career, I lamented to the CEO that I was only batting 70% on recruiting.

He got a characteristically long look in his eyes, cleared his throat and said, “Michael, I wish I had such a good hiring average.” He then worked up a twinkle and said, “And I wish I could resolve my hiring mistakes as quickly as you do.”

This was one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever worked for. And for the record, he had plenty of criticisms of my often non-traditional ideas.

But here we are, and virtually all of us in Fernandina Beach have made a bad hire.

Going forward, a small but valuable question might be, “What happened?” but a better one would be, “Where do we go from here?”

I have a few suggestions -- not as writ from the editorial chair -- but as possibilities for the whole community  to consider:

• Let’s don’t let the blame game begin. His resume was excellent, and his meet-and-greet presentations were the best. I knew no one who had reservations: He was the one.
• Picking too hard at what went wrong will get us nowhere. Yes, we’ll learn some lessons from this episode – but only time will tell if they are the lessons we need to learn.
• It will be very tempting for some good-old-boys to propose a good-old-boy as the next city manager. That might seem comfortable for some, but comfort inevitably will dissolve into lack of leadership – and possibly disaster.
• Maybe we should look where we haven’t looked before. I particularly am thinking of the many high-powered women who get a lot of things done in this community. I won’t name names. If you keep up on local events even a little bit, you probably know who I mean.
• And we should get a refund from those consultants. They screwed up big time.

My wise boss had a point: Everybody (and every community) makes mistakes. The winners are not those who fail to fall down. They are the ones who get up, dust off their britches and make it work the next time.