Trust me, I have less than no pity for the company that wilfully ignores the technical and organizational debt incurred by outsourcing to the lowest-bidding "body shop." That being said, the other end of spectrum--meaning, when any window-office satrap announces "We hire only the best," it doesn't exactly burnish their credibility in my eyes. (Eyes, I might add, that I'm trying hard not to roll. While anyone's watching.)
Why do I call B.S.? Because if you hired only the best, you would definitely not proclaim it with serene smugness. Not because you're afraid of spending your days preventing your "best" from being poached with shiny offers. Not because, statistically, it's about as vacuous a claim as can be made. Not even because a house packed with rock-star egos will make old Bedlam seem like a genteel Edwardian tea party in the garden gazebo.
No, rather because it's a curious habit of management to sack "the best" when they're at the top of their game. (FWIW, I've been laid off, but never sacked--which means I know better than to number myself among "the best.")
I'm currently mopping up Moorish Spain (a considerable improvement on A Vanished World, which is more sermon than history), and the reader can't make it past the year 711 before history makes a mockery of the boast of "hiring the best."
Today's Goths, of course, evoke a much different reaction than they did during the sunset and twilight of the Roman Empire. In the former imperial province of Hispania, they were--at best--a mixed blessing once spliced onto the top of its political, social, and religious hierarchy. Let's jump into their world and its environs.
In the Hispania of the year 711 CE, we're specifically talking about the Visigoth branch of the family. It beggars the imagination to wonder why anyone would want to be their king, what with well-armed relatives always eyeing one's crown. Plus, in the "Some things never change" department, there are always the Basques to make politics interesting. And so it is that Roderic--or Rodrigo, take your pick--finds himself and his army tied down on the northern border by fighting scarcely a year after yet another dynastic free-for-all has put the crown of Spain up for grabs.
For the most part, the drama is lost on the rest of the Mediterranean neighborhood. Muhammad has been dead just shy of 80 years, and in that time, the newest religion in town has recently arrived in the Maghrib (a.k.a. modern Morocco in northwest Africa), where it's caught on in a big way with the local (Berber) tribes.
People being people, I highly doubt that there was much correlation between the change in faith and an uptick in Berber raids into southern Spain. It had been going on for awhile, in fact, when Tariq ibn Zayid was sent north across the water to...ahem!...seek "alternative sources of revenue" for the state. That foray ended the next year in a decisive battle against what army Roderic (and his shaky allies) could throw together.
ibn Zayid won decisively, and Roderic was killed in the fray, leaving the door open for the conquest of the Visigoths' capital city of Toledo--and thence the entire pennisula. The North African governor and ibn Zayid's boss, Musa ibn Nusayr, quickly followed up with a round of devastation that basically ended any real resistance (except from the Basques, naturally).
But not before the governor, so the story goes, berated his subordinate for overstepping his authority, thrashed him with his riding crop, and demoted him. In one of history's delicious ironies, ibn Nusayr met much the same fate upon reporting--Spain's captive aristocrats and bling ostentatiously in tow--to his own bosses in Islam's capital city of Damascus.
But there is a semi-happy ending here. By tradition, Tariq ibn Zayid's invasion force landed on the isthmus of Gibraltar. The Rock of Gibraltar derives its name from the words "Jabal Tariq," meaning "Tariq's mountain." Thus, very nearly thirteen centuries later, his name lives on. Something that can't be said for his boss.
Which--for this history nerd, anyway--brings to mind another similar anecdote. For that, let's fast-forward over a millenium and change.
It is late February, 1793. A month ago, King Louis XVI felt the embrace of Madame Guillotine. The over-extended Revolutionary Army of France is, quite improbably, giving the Prussians and Austrians reason to lose sleep. Far removed from the center of action, Corsica is headed by the leader (Pasquale Paoli) responsible for prying the island away from three centuries of Genoan rule (only to be sold to France, but that's another story.)
Orders come from Paris to take the neighboring island of Sardinia. Strategically, this might have made sense to the Parisian mindset. From a local, tactical standpoint, it just comes off as stupidity--historically, the islands have been on amicable, even cozy terms. But given the Revolution's growing propensity to eat its own, insubordination is not an option. Under the circumstances, Paoli does the only sensible--if rather passive aggressive--thing: He orders his subordinate-also his nephew--to take a flop. And thus a comically under-equipped (cough!) "invasion fleet" (cough!) weighs anchor for a short tour of political theatre.
Four days later, the same woefully under-supplied rag-tag battalion is in position to take the entire island within a few more hours.
Welcome to Napoleon Bonaparte's first campaign in the service of the Revolutionary Army.
Whoops.
Fortunately for Sardinia, Paoli's nephew fabricated the threat of a mutiny, pulled rank on his future Emperor, and pointed his sails back home.
Thus I hope that the next time my gentle reader's ears and credulity are abused by the "we only hire the best" platitude, s/he will remember the flip-side of "the best" entails. Particularly if s/he is being considered for a managerial position.
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Bibliography:
Fletcher, Richard, Moorish Spain; Los Angeles, University of California Press: 2006; pp 1, 15-20
Lowney, Chris, A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medieval Spain; New York: Oxford University Press: 2005; pp 29-31, 38-39
Norwich, John Julius, The Middle Sea, a History of the Mediterranean; New York: Doubleday Publishing, 2006; pp 389-390, 412
