(07-06-2021, 08:22 PM)Scott41theMavs Wrote: In this situation, A is the most single coveted worker in the entire industry, with the promise of years of near-monopoly and stratospheric success for your company for years to come. All the sharks of your competitors in the industry are swimming around the boat, waiting for you to piss off A badly enough for him to leave the company.
Meanwhile, B was a promising worker that you sank many company assets into acquiring from a competitor and then signed to an extremely lavish salary to prevent him from moving to different competitors. Since then, he frequently calls in sick, to the extent that he might be a guy whose health might be so poor that he eventually ends up on disability, but the rules of your particular industry is that he will almost certainly still suck up the company's vital financial resources in a way that will prevent you for a few precious years from assembling the team of workers that you need to put around A in order for him to establish the industry domination of which he is so capable. When he is available to work, the one area in which B was once believed to be so dominant in the industry has in fact tanked company productivity and the ability to succeed to an absolutely ruinous extent. There is some hope that his problems in this area are due to a particularly bad illness a year ago, and that he might improve with some rehabilitation and training during the industry's dormant season, but that's extremely speculative; most believe that the damage done by the illness simply destroyed his abilities in this one-time strength to such an extent that he will always be a drain on company success for the length of his employment.
Meanwhile, B has been limited by management to areas in which he can succeed for the company as much as possible, but constantly complains that his strengths are in areas he was never known to be good at, and that A simply doesn't appreciate his abilities and works to undercut his personal (as opposed to the company's) ability to succeed. B is by far the company's most serious problem to middle term success with A. A is fed up with B's grousing and annoyed at his drain on the company's success. It is obvious that B undercuts A's happiness working for the company and causes many human resource problems with the working staff as a whole, working significantly against corporate unity and worker morale.
Basically, B resents A but knows he has no leverage against him. There is the opportunity to send B to one of the company's 29 competitors. There is some hope around the industry that B could once again become a valuable worker in the field, but everyone everywhere knows that the risks are high. The return on B in negotiating with another competitor will likely not be as wonderful as the promise of B once looked, but the health issues associated with B, the dramatic drag he represents on worker morale, and the hard work which it would take for A and B to be made to work well (or at least not damagingly) together could slow down future success that A is ready to produce right now with the correct team of workers around him. Negotiating B to a competitor, while not having completely ideal results, could at least speed the process of allowing A to bring the company tremendous success.
If A quietly reports to HR that he wants B to be moved to one of the company's competitors, it's crucial to the company's future to pull the trigger. Waiting too long to do so may lead to A valuing the huge contributions he could begin to make to the field today over the tremendous cash earnings he can only make with your company - or, lead him to be contracted to those earnings and then insist, even publicly, to be negotiated away to a competitor who will still have to pay him the same amount. That has indeed happened in the industry before, but never has there been a worker as transcendent and promising as A who has threatened to do it. In short, if A wants B gone, even politely so, the company would be cataclysmically foolish to fart around with the situation.
Good application of the paradigm to the situation, lol!
Of course, what we don't know is how the organization really views KP, or how Luka really views KP. Maybe the interpersonal situation is as dire as all that. Maybe it isn't. We only have hints at this point.
But perhaps it's at the point where Luka is coming to the organization and expressing serious concerns with KP. (If so, I hope that the conversations are going through the agent, and not being held directly with Luka. Also hope that he is not gauche enough to actually demand that a teammate be traded, but just expresses that he has serious concerns about their ability to fit together to advance the team, if in fact, he does.)
If so, maybe the organization feels that its only option is to trade KP. If so, I get it. What I am saying is that I hope they have the managerial skills to handle this in such a way as to avoid painting Luka as a snake in the grass in the locker room. The Mavs have plenty of reasons to move on from KP, apart from whatever Luka feels, and I think it would be much better if they presented it as an organizational decision based on on-court fit, and kept Luka out of it as much as they can. My question is whether they have the wherewithal to handle it sensitively, rather than asking Luka who all he wants fired and giving him a broom to brandish, sweeping everyone he doesn't like out in a public manner. It's really a question -- I don't know whether they do or don't.
Thanks for the thoughts.