…Since taking office, his round-the-clock work ethic has caused him to misplace that capacity for empathy. He seems to think that because he gets what he’s doing, everybody else will. They won’t.
It is arguable whether Rudd ‘gets’ the issues that he is acting on – I haven’t noticed any kind of understanding of systems apart from the media cycle. His obsessive work-ethic could be more like a panic to devour as many factoids about any particular topic in the hope that an intellectual framework oozes out through the sheer effort and familiarity with the topic.
He doesn’t seem curious about alternatives. You need to have a systems perspective where you can understand how structures differ from each other in order to perceive alternatives. Without that cognitive or intellectual ability you would tend to filter information in terms of volume supporting his opinion and view alternatives as noise or a nuisance – just like the illustration for the article with the reins around the wrong way.
He hasn’t really impressed in foreign relations and the Chinese think he is two-faced. One of the weirdest policies is his long term plans for the military. We have six Collins-class submarines. We can only recruit enough crew for three of them. And maintenance issues mean that only one is effectively operational. Yet, Rudd sees the future with 12 new submarines, larger than the Collins-class submarines.
You need some way of consolidating what we have now and then building a path to what you want in the future. In general, I haven’t seen Rudd display that ability. We are not out of the woods yet with the financial crisis either.
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