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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (19557)	10/28/2004 5:46:24 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

It used to be that a person achieved leadership positions because of outstanding accomplishments or grasp of the agency mission. Lately, say the last 25 years or so, leaders were selected for entirely different reasons. Highly accomplished people were passed by in favor of politically correct people. Costs skyrocketed and performance plummeted. When I was on a small management team, we resisted hiring people for politically correct reasons. We built a new office, which was much more functional for our purposes, and had lots of extra room. We were pressured to hire specialists and resisted it while maintaining a high rate of production. Our new office had lots of extra room, and conference rooms that were sorely needed. Something changed after I left this team. Before long, the extra room in the offices was filled. Then we filled up the conference rooms. Finally, a double-wide trailer was moved into the parking lot to house the extra specialists. Production went down, because they added too little value to our mission, and some of them even worked against our stated goals. From a lean and mean productive organization we went to a fat one incapable of performing the mission without a deficit of time, money, and emotional cost. Some time after this, the organization had to cut back on all the extra people that it had hired. This was a very painful process, and in my view was preventable at the outset. Yes, I think management needs to be shaken up once in a while. They say they promote risk-taking, but their behavior proves that they do not. Everyone suffers.