Rough Start for Obama and Dealing with Setbacks

I was excited about Obama from before the primaries got started.  Now his administration is getting off to a fairly rough start and it will be a true test of the man to see how he deals with it.  It seems pretty unfair to me that some folks are already loudly proclaiming their disappointment.  Given what’s going on in the economy (and the world), it seems unrealistic to me to expect everything to go smoothly.  So I for one am willing to wait a bit to see what kind of course corrections take place.

I try to do the same as a board member.  Stuff does go wrong in startups all the time, even with the best preparation.  The question is what happens after it does.  If everyone goes along with business as usual and nothing changes, that’s when you have a real problem.  But if there are lessons learned, the course corrected and – if necessary – changes made in the team, then you often wind up with a stronger and better company than if nothing had gone wrong.

As a board member I can make suggestions for what to do.  For the adminstration I can and will blog thoughts here (and send Facebook messages) but in the end just have to sit back and watch.  So here are three areas where I will be looking for change (so to speak): the Geithner “plan” for fixing the banking system, the contents and actual implementation of the stimulus, and the handling of the State-Secrets Doctrine.