I've seen quotes where Trump says he looks for loyalty as the most important thing.  This implies competence and experience are less important.  The reflecting pool business and now the problem on the aircraft carrier, while obviously not Trump's fault, may reflect this.

There is fairly strong evidence that Trump places an unusually high value on personal loyalty. He has said so repeatedly over the years. In his 2007 book he wrote, "I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive and more than energy," and as president he was reported to have told FBI Director James Comey, "I need loyalty. I expect loyalty."

Whether that means competence is less important is where interpretation begins. Supporters would argue that every president wants appointees who support the administration's goals, and that loyalty ensures policies are actually carried out. Critics argue that when loyalty becomes the dominant criterion, it can shrink the pool of experienced people willing or able to serve and discourage dissenting advice. That concern has been raised by former officials from both parties and by commentators across multiple administrations.

As for the reflecting pool project or the reported problems aboard an aircraft carrier, it is reasonable to ask whether an organization's culture affects outcomes. In any large bureaucracy, if senior positions are filled primarily for loyalty rather than expertise, mistakes are more likely to go unchallenged. On the other hand, specific operational failures usually have many causes, and it is difficult to draw a straight line from a presidential hiring philosophy to a particular construction problem or naval mishap without detailed evidence.

So I would separate two propositions:

    Trump values loyalty very highly. That is well documented and largely undisputed.

    Specific failures occurred because of that emphasis on loyalty. That is plausible as a hypothesis, but each case would need its own evidence. Correlation is easier to show than causation.

One historical observation: organizations that reward only loyalty often become less effective because subordinates stop delivering bad news. Leaders then receive a filtered picture of reality. That risk exists in governments, corporations, militaries, and nonprofits alike, regardless of ideology. The challenge for any leader is finding people who are both loyal to the mission and willing to say, "Sir, this is a bad idea."

Loyalty is essential but to me, it includes pointing out problems in a diplomatic way.  Failure to warn can be seen as a form of disloyalty.

That's a very old and widely held view of loyalty. In many traditions, the truly loyal adviser is not the one who always agrees, but the one who helps the leader avoid mistakes.

There's even a distinction between loyalty to a person and loyalty to a mission, organization, or set of principles. If your goal is the success of the enterprise, then warning about a problem is often an act of loyalty, not disloyalty. The warning may be unwelcome, but withholding it can be far more damaging.

Military organizations have wrestled with this for centuries. A subordinate is expected to obey lawful orders, but also to provide honest professional advice before the decision is made. Once the decision is made, the expectation is generally to carry it out to the best of one's ability. The ideal is neither blind obedience nor constant opposition.

Your phrasing—"pointing out problems in a diplomatic way"—gets at the practical side of it. The issue is often not whether someone raises concerns but how. An adviser who publicly embarrasses a leader may lose influence quickly. One who privately says, "Sir, I think there's a risk here and here's why," can be enormously valuable.

In business, I suspect you'd have seen the same thing. The employee who says, "Everything's fine," when he knows a claim system, underwriting rule, or accounting process is headed for trouble is not doing the company any favors. The uncomfortable conversation today may prevent the catastrophe tomorrow.

There's a famous saying often attributed to various military and political figures: if you have one person in the room who always agrees with you, one of you is unnecessary. It's a bit glib, but it captures the idea that leadership benefits from informed disagreement before a decision is made.

By your definition, loyalty isn't obedience. It's a commitment to the success and well-being of the person or organization, even when that requires delivering news they may not want to hear.

Yes—though I’d put it slightly differently: too much experience, too much institutional knowledge, too expensive, and too independent can be a dangerous combination for a new management regime.

At 54, after 30 years, you had something a 35-year-old replacement couldn't easily have: you knew how the organization actually worked, including all the reasons behind the rules that weren't necessarily written down. And if you were well paid, management could look at you as an obvious cost-saving target.

But "too much experience" is an interesting phrase because it can mean two opposite things.

If management wants to improve an organization intelligently, experienced people are enormously valuable. They know which old practices are genuinely obsolete and which ones exist because somebody learned an expensive lesson twenty years ago.

If management has already decided what the organization needs to become, however, experienced people can be inconvenient. They can say:

"We've tried something like this before."

"That metric won't measure what you think it measures."

"The vendor is the risk here."

"That isn't actually a programming problem."

And, most inconveniently:

"No."

A newer employee may have less ability to challenge the premise because he doesn't yet know enough to see all the ways it can go wrong.

So I wouldn't be surprised if your age and salary figured into the calculation. But I suspect your independence was at least as important as your salary. A highly paid 54-year-old who enthusiastically embraced the new regime might have been retained. A highly paid 54-year-old who understood the systems, had credibility with the staff, and privately told the new CIO that his centerpiece project was likely to fail was considerably harder to manage.

And there's a lovely little twist to it: they may have thought they were getting rid of an expensive, resistant old-timer, while actually getting rid of someone who was about to leave voluntarily anyway—and giving him a substantially better departure package than he had planned to receive.

If the organization really did collapse a year later, I imagine you watched that with a mixture of vindication and "well, I did try to tell you."

ERC as an insurance company had been incorporated into GE and bought some risky small European reinsurers and went on a growth binge.  Now that just doesn't work well, you can't rapidly expand reinsurance as the business involves customers over very long spans.  GE soon spun it off to Swiss Re and they wound it down.  The IT problems were probably just a pimple on a much larger affair.

Exactly. In that context, the IT collapse may have been less a cause than a symptom of a much larger strategic problem.

Reinsurance is particularly awkward for a "growth at all costs" strategy. You can write a lot more premium very quickly, but you can't manufacture the underlying relationships, underwriting knowledge, claims history, reserves, and accumulated experience at the same speed. A reinsurer can expand its book rapidly while expanding its actual ability to understand and manage that book much more slowly.

And buying small European reinsurers adds another layer: different systems, practices, portfolios, regulatory environments, and institutional knowledge. You can consolidate the legal entities and put everything under one corporate structure rather quickly. Making the underlying businesses genuinely coherent is another matter.

So if ERC was acquired by GE, pushed into expansion, accumulated risky businesses, and was subsequently spun off to Swiss Re and wound down, then the deterioration you saw in IT was probably indeed a pimple on the elephant.

It also makes your earlier story more interesting. The new CIO may have been operating on the assumption that the organization needed a dramatic modernization because the existing people and systems looked slow and conservative. But if the parent company's strategic direction itself was unsound, making the IT department more "modern" wasn't going to solve the fundamental problem.

There is a useful distinction here:

A healthy organization can have bad IT.
A bad business strategy can make good IT look bad.

And the latter is particularly dangerous because management often attacks whatever is easiest to see. IT is wonderfully visible: old systems, slow programmers, paperwork, budgets, project schedules, metrics. It's much harder to say, "Perhaps the fundamental business we're trying to build cannot sensibly be built this way."

Your old CIO's "avoid the bleeding edge" philosophy suddenly looks rather less silly in retrospect. He may have been conservative about technology, but the subsequent owners apparently went in the opposite direction on the business itself, which was the much bigger gamble.

I think about it and shiver.  They are all dead now.

I can understand the shiver. There's something eerie about looking back at an organization that was once a substantial part of your daily life and realizing that the people who made all those decisions—and argued about them, worried about them, and thought they knew what they were doing—are simply gone.

And it gives your story a strange perspective. At the time, being branded "not a team player" probably mattered. The politics mattered. The CIO mattered. The $200,000 system mattered. Whether the organization survived mattered.

Forty years later, most of that has evaporated. What remains is the sequence of events you remember: this happened, I saw that coming, I warned them, they did it anyway, and then the whole thing disappeared.

There's something sobering about that, but also something oddly liberating. Organizations can make their internal politics feel enormously consequential because everyone inside them is living inside the same little universe. Then eventually the universe disappears.

And perhaps that's one reason your earlier point about loyalty strikes me as important. You weren't loyal to a particular CIO, management fashion, or corporate strategy. You seem to have understood loyalty as trying to keep the institution from doing something you believed would hurt it, even when that made you unpopular.

They may have won the organizational argument. But history has a funny way of being the final performance review.