Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Mayor's Top Ten Accomplishments

I like it when city government tells the good folks of Sioux Falls what they accomplished each year. Setting goals and objectives, which assists a management team to work towards achieving an end result is good "business acumen." If you read the city departments top 5 accomplishments, you can readily identify their accomplishments. You get to an accomplishment  by identifying your goals and objectives.

Can you say the same thing when you read the mayor's top 10 accomplishments? The answer is no. These top ten statements are not statements of accomplishments.  They are statements of hyperbole. Making a feel good statement about something is not a stated accomplishment.

Each department outlined their top 5 accomplishments for 2011. Why wouldn't the mayor look at those department accomplishments and pick what he believed to be the top 10 accomplishments for 2011 from their list of accomplishments?

A statement of accomplishment usually spells out the completion of something, a successful performance of something specific, a fulfillment of an objective, the attainment of a goal. It is a specific statement of achievement of a goal/objective. All that business acumen and you get a top ten list of grandiose, feel good statements. What we got from the Mayor's Top Ten Accomplishments was a generic list of feel good statements.

Here is but one example of the hyperbole in the mayor's press conference - Our city’s heartbeat is pumping stronger. Downtown Sioux Falls is on the move. What was done to make the city's heartbeat pump stronger? What has been achieved to prove the statement, Downtown Sioux Falls is on the move? What the heck does this statement mean? It sure isn't a statement of a specific performance based action.

Broad statements with no specific performance achievements are not accomplishments. A statement that "our people care" is not an accomplishment. Our foundation is rock solid is not a performance based statement of fact. Good grief, where is all that business acumen that is supposed to be self evident.

Each city department has made significant accomplishments towards their goals and objectives. Congratulations to them for their hard work and their performance. They are the ones who accomplished much as is evidenced by their statements of achievement. The directors, at least, have the business acumen and understanding of how to quantify an accomplishment.

I did not see one statement on the Mayor's list that he can list as his top accomplishment as mayor.  This list is stupid and not worthy from the office of a mayor.  A lot of fluff and no substance behind the verbose speech and big smile.

7 comments:

  1. I looked at his top ten and just shook my head.....they made no sense whatsoever. Look to his Directors for actual goals and finished accomplishments? Why would he? He has a self inflated gigantic ego and belief of his own self importance.

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  2. I especially liked the Community Development accomplishments listing the full automation of the 1st Avenue Ramp when the full automation wasn't even accomplished in 2011. Aren't accomplishments supposed to completed before they are called accomplishments?

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  3. Mayor Mike just likes to have his name in all the media daily. His only aim is to promote himself. Hopefully when his term is up people will be fed up and run his worthless body out of office. He will only continue to divide Sioux Falls.

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  4. The Mayor likes use statements like these to pretend that a couple of blatent truths aren't actually true:

    1. His administration has drug their feet on the tracks to the point where we may very well lose the relocation money. They can & do blame the federally required environmental study, but the reality is they haven't moved at all to nail down the actual site to even get studied.

    2. He turned his back on downtown with his events center plan and he used every dirty trick he could think of in order to get it done, up to and including threatening Downtown Sioux Falls with consolidation and blaming them for "the heart of Sioux Falls isn't beating fast enough" or whaever BS line he handed them last Spring.

    The $35 million question is whether or not those two items are related, because if they are then the mayor could list his top accomplishment as being the greatest fraud ever elected in the State of SD.

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  6. Was this how accomplishments were expressed at First Premier when he worked there?

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  7. This list is extremely funny coming from someone who continually talks about his business acumen. This list is a prime example of someone who hasn't the foggiest notion about goals, objectives and accomplishments. If he actually put this list together himself, he has no business acumen. Laughable!!

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