Letter to the Editor / HOW TO HIRE A PRESIDENT

Roger C. Kostmayer

It’s distressing to hear wild enthusiasm for inexperienced potential candidates, like Oprah and other attractive celebrities, for the most difficult executive job on the planet.  The cure for Trump chaos is time honored attributes like truth, trust and relevant competencies; not emulation of the lack thereof.

Studies show citizens use dozens of reasons and methods to make one of the most important decisions in a democracy – and these include appearance, charm, popularity, emotional connection, familiarity, promises, self-interest, perceived commonality, single issues and lots more.  But only a rational analytic process, as boring as that sounds, produces an above average chance of selecting a candidate with high probability of real quantifiable success.

Imagine being responsible for hiring the CEO for a huge and critically important international organization.  The best professional head hunter would help you look forward, analyzing the primary challenges in the next 4 years so that the most important tools and characteristics for success can be identified.  This would lead to defining specific backgrounds, education, knowledge, experience, expertise, results, competencies, temperament and personal characteristics that should be required or would be ideal.  These pieces then produce a mosaic portrait of the candidate most likely to succeed. Candidates who least fit the model are eliminated and the remaining finalists are carefully researched, tested and scrubbed to produce your ultimate chief executive candidate.

Expecting voters to go through such a rigorous discipline is unrealistic, but doesn’t the importance of selecting the best qualified individual for the most critical job in the world deserve our best effort at a rational approach?

[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]