What are His Qualifications?

Choosing the Right Candidate for the Job

The kerfuffle over the online MAHA nomination process is playing out on social media as a high school popularity contest. People are not considering a candidate’s professional experience or education as much as they are the celebrity status and feelings they have toward a candidate.

Let’s look at a few candidates for positions as directors of NIH, FDA, or CDC. What are the qualifications required for the positions? Consider leadership, management (know the difference between leadership and management), subject matter expertise, effectiveness or past successes, and relevant experience.

The three departments listed each have tens of thousands of employees and billions of dollars in annual budget. A candidate should have experience in areas such as managing at least hundreds of people, reporting operations and finances greater than tens of millions of dollars to a board of directors or owner, involvement in securing assets such as patents or copyrights, project management of time-bound and budget-bound campaigns, and a nominal amount of subject matter knowledge, but the ability to learn more detailed subject matter as needed.

A candidate should also understand the different types of management styles and be open to ones that fit the organization envisioned, if not already existing. Resetting an organization’s culture is a very difficult process. A candidate should be able to learn the necessary management techniques in the context of employment law adherence and public messaging requirements.

This is obviously not an exhaustive list, but needs to end here so as not to lose the reader in boredom.

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Candidate X

Candidate X is a physician, who is well-regarded and has a large social media presence. He has been on many podcast interviews and is well-published in the medical journals. Perhaps he has a non-profit and is in business with a larger entity that uses his name for profit. He has no real direct management responsibility of more than five people as the non-profit foundation has a board and management structure with him as a figurehead. The larger entity uses him as the marketing voice for the products, but the entity’s management and leadership rely on Candidate X for nothing more than product promotion. Nonetheless, he’s a good guy and was a good physician before the promotional endeavors. He has subject matter expertise, but does not listen well to others’ ideas or give praise to others for their work. Candidate X is wildly popular, but neither a good leader nor manager.

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Candidate Y

Candidate Y is a physician, academic, and professor. He is well-published in the journals and has secured grants to fund his research. He is well-known and also has a large following on social media. He has never managed more than a few people on a research project or maybe ten people in his department.

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Brian Hooker

The others (X and Y) are not anyone in particular. If you think they resemble someone, then think again. They resemble many. I purposely chose traits from multiple people. I am not naming anyone in particular.

I chose Brian Hooker here because I wanted to name at least one person and I’ve not seen him nominated for anything. He may very well be nominated, but he’s not prolific on X. So he’s not self-promoting and part of the high school popular crowd. Sorry Brian. You’re popular with those who count though.

Seriously, I wanted to relate something here and Brian just came to mind. In my career, I once had to deal with a divisional executive vice president to ask a favor for his team to create a product I needed to interface, or link, two other products. He spoke humbly to me in other meetings we’d had. But when I got on the phone with him and his direct reports (division directors), he was totally different. He was not humble at all. He was demanding and short and curt. The personality or management style is often called “director” or “authoritative.” He challenged me sternly and demanded of me in front of his senior management staff, “If I do this, can you guarantee me I’ll get millions of dollars in revenue?” I replied, “I can’t guarantee you that. But I can guarantee that if you don’t do it, you won’t get millions of dollars in revenue.” He made the product for me. I won the deal for $millions, which quickly became tens of millions across Raytheon, Honeywell, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and others. To date, it has been over $1 billion in revenue for that company.

I ran into Brian Hooker at the Connecticut Vax Bus when CHD and Polly were there. The funny thing was that I just walked up to a guy and started talking to him. I didn’t know it was Brian Hooker. We had a great conversation about data and inferential statistical methods. He was open to debate and not at all rigid in thinking. I was quite impressed with his ability to tolerate my style in the moment because I can be dry in my humor and sarcastic at times toward statistical methods. I really liked him and respected his knowledge and openness in conversation.

Then … months or a year later, I was on a call with Brian and his team. He was in manager mode. His demeanor was completely different. He exuded leadership and management skills, was respected by his team, and we came quickly to an agreement on action items. The call was business professional and efficient.

What I learned was that Brian has great skills that make him a really good candidate for the positions mentioned above. Due to a popularity contest, he may not be considered for the top position in one of the three organizations, but not because he cannot do it. Nonetheless, there are many deputy director positions for which he should be considered.

I chose Brian based on my two impressions. If he is normally like those two instances, then he’s a far better candidate than X or Y because he has management, leadership, finance, and subject matter experience.

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The intent of this article is simply to get people to think about relevant qualifications. And don’t forget that even if someone has all the requisite experience and knowledge, they might still be terrible for the job. I knew many vice presidents who were horrendous. Only because they were vice presidents in prior jobs were they chosen to be vice presidents again and again, failing time after time. LOL. It cracks me up how bad some were at management and leadership. Yet they got the job because they had “experience.”

Choose wisely, my friends. And don’t be like lefties, who like Hollywood celebrities for important positions. Don’t rely on celebrity status within the health freedom movement else you’ll saddle us all with ineffective leadership. Look at what someone has really accomplished. What books or papers did they really write and deeply participate in? What initiatives did they really come up with? What unique findings did they conceive and bring to the world? If it’s only one thing in four years, then maybe rethink the accomplishments in context of a top management position.

God bless you all.

John 14:6 TRUTH