On the CBS Facebook page, there is the following post:

Veterans, CBS News wants to hear from you — do you think the resignation of VA secretary Shinseki is fair or politically motivated?

My initial response was

What does CBS think about its reporting on this issue? Has it reported enough depth of facts so that we can answer the question posed? Was Shinseki working on fixing the problem before it blew up? Was anybody fighting for more resources for the VA? (What did Bernie Sanders do? What was the House’s response to Bernie Sanders? Is it true that we cannot afford more resources for the VA? When a country is sovereign in its own currency, has huge unemployment, has idle factories, has corporations not investing their cash, and has plenty of natural resources, is it true that the deficit is a constraint on what we can afford?)

What was in CBS’s coverage of the Memorial Day celebrations to give us a hint as to whether people were just speaking platitudes or they were actually backing up their words of thanks with actions of thanks?

Will the news media ever take responsibility for their role in what the public does and doesn’t know?

To another comment,

The top man at any large institution such as the VA will not be aware of day-to-day operations at specific locations. He’s the sacrificial lamb.

I replied as follows:

If Shinseki had come out and said, “Well this behavior was a complete surprise to me.”, that might have been honest, but it would not have been an indication that he was a good manager.

When people’s jobs are on the line to meet a goal that cannot be met with the resources at their disposal, how do you expect them to react?  Can you expect a certain amount of cheating the measurement system?

There is a management style called “managing by walking around.”  This means that no matter what formal methods you have of keeping track of the organization, a manager learns a lot by walking around, observing the organization at work, and speaking directly to random employees that you meet while walking around.

At the last company I worked for of thousands of employees, the top guys had a habit of eating in the cafeteria and setting their tray down in a random empty spot at a table of random employees and talking to the people around them.  It made us feel better about the company to know that they did that.

You can put your two cents worth in, too.