It probably is no longer accurate to describe the Seahawks front office as a train wreck. Train wrecks are a finite occurrence, eventually they stop. This thing has stretched on for the last two+ seasons, and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. The clown car that is the Seahawks front office just got a little wackier. It is not even possible to read between the lines anymore because they are so scrambled, M.C. Escher would be confused. One thing that triggered my cringe reflex was reading about how Leiweke is committed to managing the collaborative decision making across the myriad of front office roles.
I have never played organized football. I have never hired an executive. I have never paid someone a kajillion dollars. One thing I have done is manage some of the most complex projects in the software industry. I have inherited and overseen some of the most convoluted management structures one could imagine where literally dozens of high-ranking officials believed they owned each decision. There was always a lot of talk about collaboration and “doing the right thing for the business.” What I learned was that collaboration should be used as way to generate and/or validate ideas, it should never be used as a decision-making model. Defined authority equals defined accountability, and vice versa.
How many people will need to be involved when the moment of truth arrives for a free agent offer? Can our new GM make that decision on his own? Will he need to run it by Carroll? What about Leiweke? What will the velocity of our decision making be? Will players know who decides what?
“My job will be to synthesize that group,” Leiweke said. “But everybody is going to sign on to a plan where they’re going to work together.”
He went on to say, “We’re going to have collaboration on the draft. Our general manager will hear from Pete, and that’s a really important thing. And that’s really how we wanted to set this up. There’s two kinds of tension, good tension and bad tension. We’re going to set this up where there’s good tension where people are weighing in and we’re talking and we’re communicating. “No one person will sit in judgment of sweeping issues.”Those words should make every Seahawks fan shudder. We now are left to hope that this wackado structure magically forms into a functioning whole, where the left arm and legs belong to one person, the right arm and heart belong to another and the brain is spliced across all three. Dr. Frankenstein failed with such experiments dozens of times, and his “success” killed people. Hawks fans will soon be saying, “Rise….RIIIIISSE,” to more than just our battered QB.