Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Calling of Perseus
(between 1877 and 1898)

"Never be needier than the country you were elected to lead."

Perhaps the first principle of project management, which I used to teach and practice professionally, must be: “Never be needier than your project.” This principle was not supposed to be interpreted as an invitation to strive to be selfless in service, or in servitude, to your effort, but to more properly focus the professional’s attention. If one intends to provide some service, it doesn’t do for that service provider to be needier than their client. The client’s needs remain paramount in that context, and while it still matters that the service provider’s needs are attended to, the purpose of the engagement cannot degrade solely into ensuring the caregiver’s satisfaction. I do not intend to ignore the service provider’s legitimate needs, just to reinforce the notion that those needs should not be the primary focus of a service relationship. This principle requires some maturity from the professional, some ability to at least defer their needs in favor of somebody else’s, at least for the duration of the engagement, or, lacking that, how about during office hours?

This principle might, in practice, prove to be pure fiction, for in fact, the service provider’s needs must remain a significant part of every service provider’s personal equation. In actual practice, the service provider’s personal purpose for engaging might prove to be the most critical variable in any such equation, for it seems as if that must be clearly understood, lest the service provider lose motivation for engaging. Perhaps the principle would be better stated if it suggested suspending some needs temporarily and focusing most attention on the needs of others when engaging in the profession. The temporary nature of this amendment might mitigate the otherwise apparent need to sacrifice self, which throws a popular imponderable into the equation. Selfless service seems impossible to provide if said service must be delivered by said self. A paradox, but one of many that anyone encounters when trying to make sense of service or profession.

The chief problem with our so-called chief executive might be that he was never particularly executive material. He demonstrated this obvious fact through several interminable seasons of his sleazy little television series, The Apprentice, where he pretended to know how to perform in the role of chief executive but only managed to demonstrate how to generate workplace employment law violations. He played the part of someone volatile and unhinged, holding those who played his subordinates responsible for satisfying his capricious expectations. I never watched the show, but apparently, it was run like a lifeboat drill, where individual subordinates were fired in turn until one of the originals remained, who would be crowned Apprentice, or something like that, as if that might be experienced as an award or a win. In practice, our imaginary chief executive performed his role as if he were a child, raising his voice for inappropriate matters, and dismissing “employees” as if their rights and needs didn’t matter. No chief executive worth their salt ever spends so much time finding fault.

Maturity was never all it was ever cracked up to be, but immaturity was never necessarily any better. The responsibilities we hold in trust for and with others should properly constrain our actions. We might be free, but never at liberty to emotionally back some truck up and over another. Every role we play demands from us at least an ounce of dignity and understanding toward our fellow human beings. The alternative devolves into something resembling a whim-ocracy, a form of governance where it’s utterly impossible to anticipate its trajectory. This form can’t be good for anybody, and the only reasonable explanation for its manifestation might be that somebody, probably the imaginary chief executive pretending to be in charge, insists upon being needier than his project. This amounts to a rookie form of engagement, disclosing only how unsuited an incumbent might always have been to hold not just the job, but the sacred responsibility everybody owes to others, whatever their job, even if that job turns out to be the President of a once-United States.

I am not proposing abstract theory here, but bare rock reality in practice. The Neediness we experience on a (excuse the trite usage) “daily basis” or even more frequently merely clarifies the utter incompetence of our poor little rich boy incumbent. He performs like an emotional infant, an Enfant Terrible, literally getting away with murder. His presence, his ongoing performance, absolutely screams his underlying Neediness. By many accounts, he was always haunted by an underlying unsatisfiable Neediness, as exhibited by his libertine lifestyle and mindless pursuit of what should have been more than enough, but, sadly, wasn’t. Such unquenchable wants point to something other than conventional thirsts. They scream the sorts of immaturity that cannot be cured by either aging or experience. Forty-Seven’s destined to eighty-six as a child, and we will very likely be suffering the consequences of having been led by a child’s abject Neediness through the balance of the upcoming century. Never be needier than the country you were elected to lead.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz