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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (252145)	11/11/2005 5:48:19 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574270

People in FEMA were more worried about meeting the legalities of their assignment rather than doing their job; more concerned about appearances rather than being effective. The problem is that the whole system is designed to make people more concerned about the regulations and the legalities and certain political concerns and CYA than being effective. Sometimes you get great people in the right positions and you can get around that to an extent but large government bureaucracies, or even corporate bureaucracies tend to work in the negative way that Welsh describes. If people in positions in the system tried to go around the all the legalities and politics and concern for CYA in the past they probably got punished for it in some way. They might have been fired, or maybe just not promoted, or possibly even just lost political power within the organization without actually losing their position. All of these things tend to chase out or keep down the people who don't play the game. That fact tends to get people who do play the game in the positions to make decisions when a crisis happens. By "the system" I don't just mean FEMA but our federal bureaucracy in general. The military is probably better at reducing the effect of this type of thing, esp. when there is a major war and real leadership becomes vital, but such problems still occurred even in the middle of WWII. The private sector tends to also have somewhat less of a problem with these factors than the government. The profit motive in companies reduces the effect of this problem, but it doesn't eliminate it. Sometimes the reverse happens and these problems eliminate the profit. Which doesn't mean we should just give up. Demand for change can have a positive effect at the margin, and that positive effect can be important even if the system still stinks in many ways. Tim