Item three concerns the species' procedure for reviewing its hired leaders. In Manchester, England, the managers of Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur meet at Old Trafford in a Premier League fixture, both under formally increasing pressure. The remediation plan in force is elegant: each failing leader will be publicly examined by the other failing leader, while the employer observes from a stand, at the distance from which all hires look sound.
Finding 4.1 (Leadership Evaluation, Terran Method): when an institution identifies an underperforming leader, it does not commission a neutral review. It schedules the leader against a second underperforming leader of equivalent rank, admits approximately 74,000 witnesses, and designates the final score as the sole assessment instrument. The examination has been administered weekly across the species' league system since 1888, in which period this desk has recorded no instance of both parties passing simultaneously. Remediation is due the first Monday after either club declares itself satisfied. Recurrence risk: structural.
Gerald Prew, Director of Managerial Continuity at one of the two clubs, speaking on condition of continued employment, told this desk: "We employ two underperforming managers so that each always has a reference. Whoever wins was the correct hire. We will assume we knew that at the time. The other was due diligence." Colin Ashworth, chair of an independent supporters' association, said: "Both managers retain the full backing of their boards. We are advised that the backing, like the fixture list, is reviewed weekly, and that next week's backing is already printed."
Attendance is mediated by a waiting list, the local term for the queue of the queue: spectators wait years for the right to wait for a seat. The institutions' chief executives, the dominant primates of their respective corporate troops, are expected to observe from the stand, the vantage from which the species traditionally reviews problems it has already paid to create. Behind them, in an institution licensed to store numbers, sit the severance accounts of each club's departed leaders, provisioned in case the examination concludes against the examinee. The withdrawal slips are pre-signed.
The desk has reviewed the review and finds the procedure sound by the only available measure: everyone paid to evaluate it is employed by it. Decision of the desk: coverage will continue until a neutral assessor is located. The desk has checked. The neutral assessor is on the waiting list. — Xylar Veen, Editor-in-Chief
