Nassim Nicholas Taleb summed up in a simple aphorism what most of us instinctively know about bureaucracies:
Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.
When something goes wrong, the bureaucrats play the blame-shifting game. Musical chairs will begin, and some poor fool will be stuck without a chair. When something goes right, of course, executive management will take credit. Your job as a bureaucrat is to be an implicitly political creature; to make your boss look good and, for yourself, to evade blame.
Bureaucracies become much worse when they are divorced from the profit motive. At least a large corporation must theoretically serve its customers in some positive manner, or they won’t remain in business for long. So while the internal politics of a large corporation are likely to suck like a Hoover, the external face of the company is often still somewhat pleasant for the customer.
With government bureaucracy, even that small consolation is lost. Go to the DMV, or any large government bureau. Long lines, smelly “customers”, and agents with extremely unpleasant attitudes abound. The motive is not to serve citizens well, or even to serve them quickly, but rather to meet the bare minimum necessary to avoid blame — and sometimes not even that.
Thales, “Bureacracy is Designed to Suck”, The Declination, 2018-05-02.
July 26, 2020
QotD: Bureaucracy at its heart
June 19, 2020
National Defence Headquarters needs to go on a crash diet
Ted Campbell knows how Canada’s NDHQ got into the state it is in, and has some suggestions for getting it out of its critical state of administrative morbid obesity:
Major General George R. Pearkes Building in Ottawa, home of National Defence Headquarters on Colonel By Drive.
Photo by DXR via Wikimedia Commons.
National Defence Headquarters is a HUGE place with diverse functions. First: it is, simultaneously, the management centre of the Department of National Defence, which is a very large (and complex) department of government that includes the Canadian Armed Forces (but the CAF is just one of DND’s “arms”), and it is the national command centre for the Canadian Armed Forces. Second: it is one of the biggest budget departments in Canada. Defence spending supports many hundreds of thousands of jobs in the military, in the civil service and all across the spectrum of Canadian industry from the highest of high-tech enterprises through to janitorial services. It is never surprising when things fall through the cracks in any large, complex organization, is it?
But there are two other problems:
As defence spending has declined, year-after-year, always in terms of GDP and often in terms of its share of the public accounts and sometimes in real, dollar terms, too, the headquarters, especially the military’s command and control (C²) superstructure, has grown. A bit of growth is not surprising when one must “do more with less” as I well remember being told during the rounds of budget and staff cuts in the 1990s. Although to their credit, defence ministers in the Chrétien-Martin era imposed a series of staff cuts on the HQs in Ottawa, there was a bit of growth in the (largely civil service) policy and financial management areas. But in the Harper era that all changed. Budget pursestrings were loosened by governments after 2001 and, under e.g. Conservative Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor the Canadian Forces began to receive some much needed new equipment including the big CC-177 Globemaster III transport planes, new CH-147F Chinook transport helicopters and Leopard tanks ~ all procured on sole-source contracts, over the objections of many. But then O’Connor was replaced by Peter MacKay and, it appeared to me, the generals and admirals took over and the HQ went from lean to overweight and then to downright fat. Then, in the Trudeau era, the HQ went from simply being fat to being morbidly obese. There are, now, hundreds of admirals and generals, managing a military force that numbers in the (too few) thousands. Even serving flag and general officers have told me that cutting the highest ranks by ⅓ would do no harm and some retired officers and civil servants (with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the HQ at the highest levels) say that a 50% cut would be healthy. The simple fact is that the Canadian Forces have too many very smart, very able senior officers with too little real work to do. They, not surprisingly, fill the time available with “work” of their own devising which, often, involves creating new and more complex command structures which require more and more general officers. The process seems unconstrained from the top.
Why? What happened?
Well, it started with the very best of intentions. I recall being told by one very, very fine general that we, the Canadian Forces, must, above all else, be “interoperable” with our American allies and that, he explained, meant adapting to their command and control system, poor as he thought it was. He said, and he meant, adapting, not adopting. But he retired and a new generation of officers entered the most senior ranks and some of them seemed, to me, to be more interested in adopting than in just adapting to. We seemed, in the 2000s, to be seized by a giant case of military penis envy and we seemed to want to have a local version of whatever the Americans had. The result was a proliferation of new command and control organizations, all put in place as the combat elements were actually shrinking. The end result was an unconscionable GOFO [General Officer/Flag Officer] to combat sailor and solder ratio and a bloated and, in my opinion, weak and inefficient command and control superstructure.
May 20, 2020
Bidding farewell to “the dumbest management fad of all time”
Jessica Stillman hails one positive likely outcome of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic … the end of the “open office plan”:
Example of an open plan office
Photo by VeronicaTherese via Wikimedia Commons.
My Inc.com colleague Geoffrey James memorably called open-plan offices “the dumbest management fad of all time.” And with good reason. Not only do many workers loathe the interruption-prone, privacy-free spaces, but science shows they don’t even achieve their stated aim of fostering greater collaboration.
The current pandemic is a heart-breaking tragedy of epic proportions, but according to experts, it might at least have one small silver lining. Maybe, just maybe it will spell the end of the hated open-plan office.
[…]
All this means employers will need to find creative solutions to get work done even though far fewer people can safely fit in the same space. Continued work-from-home arrangements will certainly be part of the answer, but creative reconfiguring of your physical office is likely to be necessary too.
That’s a headache for facilities managers and bosses, but better news for open-plan office haters. In a post-coronavirus world, you will almost certainly have more privacy at work. In trade for that personal space, however, expect to submit to measures like temperature checks, half-empty break rooms, and a whole lot of hand sanitizer.
May 19, 2020
Some changes to the working world … when the world gets back to working
Sean Gabb has some thoughts on the post-lockdown return so … well, not normal, but as the economy reaches toward a new working equilibrium:
Kensington High Street at the intersection with Kensington Church Street. Kensington, London, England.
Photo by Ghouston via Wikimedia Commons.
The Coronavirus and its aftermath of lingering paranoia are the perfect excuse. Decentralisation and homeworking must be done. They must be done for the duration. They must be continued after that to maintain social distancing. No one will think ill of Barclays and WPP for taking the leap. No one will blame them for taking the leap in a way that involves a few deviations from course and a less than elegant landing. A year from now, these organisations will be making measurably larger profits than they would be otherwise. The mistakes will have been ignored.
And other organisations will follow. Whether the present crash will bring on a depression shaped like a V or an L, there is no doubt that, even if slowly at first, the wheels of commerce will continue turning. But they will be turning on different rails. As with any change of course, there will be winners and losers. I have already discussed how I can expect to be among the winners. I will leave that as said for the other winners — these being anyone who can find a market for doing from home what was previously required by custom and lack of imagination to be done somewhere else. I will instead mention the losers.
Most obvious among these will be anyone involved in commercial property. Landlords will find themselves with many more square feet to fill than prospective tenants want to fill. Rental and freehold values will crumble. Bearing in mind how much debt is carried by commercial landlords, there will be some interesting business failures in the next few years. Then there are the ancillary sectors — property management companies, commercial estate agents, maintenance companies. These employ swarms of architects and surveyors and lawyers and negotiators, of builders, plumbers, electricians, of drivers and cleaners. If the humbler workers will eventually find other markets, many with degrees and professional qualifications can look to a future of straitened circumstances.
The lush residential estates in and about Central London will follow. I think particularly of the aristocratic residential holdings in Kensington. Houses here go for tens of thousands a week to senior bank workers from abroad. If the City and Canary Wharf are emptied out, who needs to live in a place like Kensington? It has poor Underground connections. It is close by places like Grenfell Tower. Its residents keep predators at bay only by heavy investment of their own in security and by suspecting every knock on the door and every sound in the night. Many of the shops and eateries that make its High Street an enjoyable place to be will not reopen. Those that do reopen will be hobbled by continuing formal and informal rules on social distancing.
As a result, restaurants and pubs and coffee bars will begin to disappear. All but a few of these were barely making normal profit before they were closed last month. So few are in liquidation as yet only because so few petitions have been lodged in the courts. Most of them will now be surplus to requirement. The same can be said of hotels. Speaking for myself, I used to visit Cambridge twice a year on examinations business. I was always put up there for a couple of nights. I shall now do from home all that I did in Cambridge. I doubt I am alone. Zoom will destroy business travel. In the same way, bigger televisions plus continued social distancing will finish off the theatres and cinemas — also in decline before last month.
March 9, 2020
QotD: The wrong lessons learned from World War II
Lyndon Johnson led the country into a massive military commitment in South Vietnam in part because of misplaced faith in what the United States could accomplish by force of arms. The Johnson administration convinced itself that fighting modern wars was a branch of management science, akin to running a large corporation like General Motors, and that America’s military was a versatile instrument that could be dialed up or down to deliver precisely calibrated levels of violence, tailored to meet any foreign policy challenge. World War II also led many Americans to conclude that liberal democracy could be imposed on foreign peoples through the application of what George W. Bush’s administration would later call “shock and awe.”
It turns out that, even in the age of precision weapons, military power is a blunt instrument, ill-suited to nation-building, except in rare circumstances and at great cost. Germany and Japan — our preferred examples — are highly idiosyncratic. Liberal democracy flourished in each only after the deaths of millions of citizens and the reduction of their societies to rubble. Americans haven’t shown much stomach for projects of this scope after 1945.
E. M. Oblomov, “The Greatest Generation and the Greatest Illusion: Success in World War II led Americans to put too much faith in government—and we still do.”, City Journal, 2017-12-28.
February 2, 2020
Boeing and the kitchen sink
In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall looks at the mess the new Boeing management has inherited and what they may need to do to be seen to be fixing it:
“Boeing 521 427”by pmbell64 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Which brings us to another piece of stock market wisdom, about trying to catch a falling knife. A dangerous occupation and the reference is to trying to call the bottom on some stock that has just had a disaster. At some point, surely, the tumble in price will stop and there will be a bounce. Well, yes, or perhaps maybe, for we must not forget that that proper bottom is that end of life – the bankruptcy – price of nothing. For everything that isn’t about to go bust then yes, there’s a price at which buying in the face of everyone else’s panic can be highly profitable. The question being, well, what is about to go bust? Toys R Us did, after all. Actually, so have quite a lot of retailers just recently. There was no above zero price at which it was sensible to buy in.
So, some stock crashes in price, should we buy in? After all, there is that phenomenon known as the dead cat bounce – anything will bounce at least once if you drop it from high enough. The question becomes one of, well, is this crash a result of something that can be reversed, or perhaps something that’s not going to be terminal for the organisation? Or is this just the start of that realisation process that the organisation is coming to the end of its life and going to that final resting place of a zero dollar valuation?
[…]
So, Boeing and the 737 Max. The changes in airframe had the unfortunate consequence of diving a couple of the planes into the ground. We’ve had a drip of stories about how the development process wasn’t all we would wish it to be. The FAA isn’t going to let it back up into the air until the summer at earliest. The Dreamliner seems to be having demand problems and, well, things aren’t looking good.
But is this the start of some spiral to zero? No, don’t be daft. Partly because the American government simply would not allow that. Boeing’s too much part of the backdrop of the US economy for that to be left to happen. The military business is also of significant value whatever happens to the civil aviation side. And of course the numbers we’re talking about here could be painful to stock holders – they are already in part of course – but at the very worst we’re looking at some tens of billions of problem here. That’s just not enough to drive a company Boeing’s size down to zero. Not in this decade at least, given that the only reasonable competition is Airbus. Global duopolies don’t end that way.
So, at this point there’s an argument to say that trying to catch that falling knife of the Boeing stock price might be worthwhile. So, when might that be? At which point another idea, kitchen sinking. This is when a new management team decides to make themselves look good by declaring how bad things had got under the previous one. Absolutely anything and everything that looks like, it might even smell of a problem in the future is taken out and declared. Provisions are made for this problem on this contract, for that problem that might occur over there, add a bit more and then heck, why not, double it! This has, assuming the company survives this balance sheet massacre, the obvious effect of making the new management team look good over the years. Not just because everything starts from this new low place. But also because many of those provisions – those over-provisions – won’t be needed and can be written back from reserves into the P&L.
October 25, 2019
QotD: Command and control in the US military
The crux of the author’s complaint is that military commanders have been relegated to the status of administrators and managers because the US Army is all about process and seems to care too little about results. The author complains, with reason, that headquarters, from battalion to the highest levels, have gotten larger and larger and more and more complex but appear to actually accomplish less and less. I think the same complaints can be, validly, made about Canada.
It is not surprising that Canada, like Australia, Britain, Chile and Denmark, has adapted at least some of the US military’s system ~ the USA has, after all, the most powerful military in the world. They must be doing something right, right?
Actually, since about 1950s, the US military has been distinguished by blunders and defeats at least as often as we have seen periodic displays of operational prowess: Viet Nam, Bay of Pigs, the failed hostage rescue in Iran, the invasion of Grenada, the second Iraq War all come to mind. The American military legacy has even spawned American satirical films about (constantly failing) American military command. That’s something I though only the Brits could do.
Ted Campbell, “Military command and control”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2017-09-16.
November 1, 2018
Change appears to be inevitable for North American railways
In a recent column in Trains, Fred Frailey examines the long-term impact of the late Hunter Harrison’s railway management reforms:
Union Pacific locomotive 5587, a General Electric AC4400CW-CTE(AC44CWCTE)
Photo by Terry Cantrell via Wikimedia Commons.
In the year since Hunter Harrison’s death, Precision Scheduled Railroading, or PSR, has progressed from crackpot railroading (in the eyes of some railroaders and shippers) to the gold standard. And it happened so fast we are still trying to wrap our arms around what it means for the future of this industry.
The facts are these: Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, and CSX Transportation have been put through Harrison’s PSR wringer, emerging in every case much leaner in terms of productive assets — cars, locomotives, trackage, and employees. That meant tons of savings to hand to investors. Interesting to me is what happened after that. CN, which Harrison ran as president or CEO from 1998 through 2009, went on a growth spurt in that period that continues to this day. Revenue ton miles at CN — the most basic measure of what a railroad does — rose 48 percent between Harrison’s retirement in 2009 and 2017. So it’s clear that downsizing the railroad’s assets didn’t inhibit Canadian National’s growth, because no other railroad even approaches what it accomplished during this period. Revenue ton miles rose slightly during Harrison’s tenure at Canadian Pacific and are now rising faster. His successor there, Keith Creel, says CP is game to grow. That’s the same story coming from Jim Foote, who succeeded Harrison late in 2017 at CSX.
Harrison’s impact on the other railroads of North America is palpable. The man was scarcely buried before financial analysts forgot the chaos he unleashed in his hurry to implement PSR at CSX and began asking other railroads why they weren’t more like CN, CP and CSX. Union Pacific, the oldest surviving nameplate in American railroading, capitulated and began implementing PSR practices last October on the eastern part of the railroad, with a goal of expanding the transformation to the entire system within several years. Chief Executive Lance Fritz insists this isn’t a case of PSR Lite.
[…] To change the railroad, you must change the culture. Harrison did it in every instance by force majeure — if you didn’t embrace his plan, goodbye. Who will change the culture at Union Pacific? I am at a loss to know. My sources say the impetus for PSR came not from within the railroad, but from the board of directors, which puts Lance Fritz in a thankless position. He must lead the effort, but this isn’t his idea, and morale in management ranks is low to begin with. His chief operations officer is new to the job, and nothing in the man’s background shouts to me that he is up to this.
Yet there are a lot of smart people at Union Pacific, and no company of its stature launches something of this magnitude with a will to fail. I am heartened that UP began by pruning its management ranks — in 2017 it counted 3,678 executives, officials and staff assistants, versus BNSF’s 1,511. (In fairness, BNSF outsources its information technology, whereas UP does not, accounting for some of the difference.) UP revealed in late 2018 it would eliminate 500 nonunion jobs by year’s end, plus 200 contract workers.
But let’s face it: As done by Harrison, you begin the PSR process by stripping a railroad to its underwear. At CSX it meant cutting every conceivable cost, denuding the railroad of field supervisors and just about everything else, until it began to be dysfunctional. That’s when he knew he had cut enough and could add back assets to make the railroad workable. This method is like becoming pregnant; there is no half way. Union Pacific began Precision Scheduled Railroading with a go-slow approach, not wanting to punish shippers and arouse regulators. Hmm. The way to looks to me now, UP may achieve some good financial results but not the sort that Hunter Harrison could or that its directors might expect. It would be a lot easier for UP to simply buy Canadian Pacific and let Keith Creel, a Harrison acolyte who knows PSR inside and out, come in as an outsider and do the dirty work. And if the process will be hard for Union Pacific, imagine the barriers to PSR in front of BNSF, KCS, and NS, all under pressure to walk the walk but so far unwilling to do so.
May 18, 2018
Missing the entire point of the capitalist system
At the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall tried to explain why the UK Commons committee looking into the Carillion collapse appear to misunderstand the current economic system in a big way:
Frank Field and his mates on the Commons work and pensions committee really do have some ‘splainin’ to do here. For they’ve entirely missed the structure of our current society and the reasons why that structure both exists and works. They go on about the greed at Carillion, the corporate vanity, the bad management. Then they complain that it’s gone bust. Finally, that we need a management system to prevent corporate greed and vanity from bankrupting companies.
No you fools, that Carillion went bust is the very point and purpose of the system. This is how we leach corporate vanity and greed out of the system, those who practise it leave the system.
[…]
What’s being missed is that this is good. Not the greed, obviously, for that’s something ever present in human nature. But what happens to those who act it out, bankruptcy.
[…]
And haven’t they come up with a likely candidate for making things worse? That a committee of bureaucrats should be making commercial decisions for companies instead of the directors and management. Really, that’ll work wonders, won’t it?
[…]
People who screw up, for whatever reason, disappear from the economic stage. Which is what we want of course, those who screw up to leave said economic stage. We have actually tried bureaucracy as a method of managing this and as the persistence of the National Coal Board, the very existence of British Leyland, show, that’s a system which doesn’t work. Either of those organisations would have disappeared at least a decade before they did without bureaucratic interference. Indeed, that’s how the bureaucracy’s actions were justified, to “save” them. That is, markets are more ruthless at weeding out failures than bureaucracies are.
What have we here? A complaint that markets weeded out a failure and to stop this we must have bureaucracy?
Carillion going bust is the very point of our having a market based economic system. Sure, they screwed up – bye bye Carillion. See, it works!
So why the hell are Frank Field and friends complaining? We already have a system which ensures that failures go kablooie – bankruptcy in our market economy.
May 11, 2018
“65% of managers add zero or negative net value to the company” Jordan Peterson
TheArchangel911
Published on 21 Sep 2017to see the full lecture go to https://youtu.be/Q7GKmznaqsQ
In this lecture, he talks about the thorny problem of predicting performance: academic, industrial, creative and entrepreneurial); about the practical utility of such prediction, in the business and other environments; about the economic value of accurate prediction (in hiring, placement and promotion) — which is incredibly high.
Intelligence (psychometrically measured IQ) is the best predictor of performance in complex, ever changing environments. Conscientiousness is the (next) best predictor, particularly in the military, in school and in conservative businesses. Agreeable people make better caretakers; disagreeable people, better disciplinarians and negotiators (within reasonable bounds). Open people are artistic, creative and entrepreneurial. Extraverts are good socially. Introverts work well in isolation. People low in neuroticism have higher levels of tolerance for stress (but may be less sensitive to real signs of danger).
Match the career you pursue to your temperament, rather than trying to adjust the latter. Although some adjustment is possible, there are powerful biological determinants of the five personality dimensions and IQ (particularly in environments where differences are allowed to flourish).
March 27, 2018
Metrics are merely a tool. Like any tool they can be misused.
A big problem with depending on metrics is finding things to count that are actually useful measurements of whatever you’re tracking. A lot of bad management decisions can be traced to poorly chosen metrics. As a general rule, just because something can be measured doesn’t automatically mean that measurement will be useful. Tim Harford reviews a recent book on metrics:
Jerry Z Muller’s latest book is 220 pages long, not including the front matter. The average chapter is 10.18 pages long and contains 17.76 endnotes. There are four cover endorsements and the book weighs 421 grammes. These numbers tell us nothing, of course. If you want to understand the strengths and weaknesses of The Tyranny of Metrics you will need to read it — or trust the opinion of someone who has.
Professor Muller’s argument is that we keep forgetting this obvious point. Rather than rely on the informed judgment of people familiar with the situation, we gather meaningless numbers at great cost. We then use them to guide our actions, predictably causing unintended damage.
A famous example is the obsession, during the Vietnam war, with the “body count” metric embraced by US defence secretary Robert McNamara. The more of the enemy you kill, reasoned McNamara, the closer you are to winning. This was always a dubious idea, but the body count quickly became an informal metric for ranking units and handing out promotions, and was therefore often exaggerated. Counting bodies became a risky military objective in itself.
This episode symbolises the mindless, fruitless drive to count things. But it also shows us why metrics are so often used: McNamara was trying to understand and control a distant situation using the skills of a generalist, not a general. Muller shows that metrics are often used as a substitute for relevant experience, by managers with generic rather than specific expertise.
Muller does not claim that metrics are always useless, but that we expect too much from them as a tool of management. For example, if a group of doctors collect and analyse data on clinical outcomes, they are likely to learn something together. If bonuses and promotions are tied to the numbers, the exercise will teach nobody anything and may end up killing patients. Several studies have found evidence of cardiac surgeons refusing to operate on the sickest patients for fear of lowering their reported success rates.
October 8, 2017
QotD: Excess officers
Excess? The German Army of WW II somehow managed to fight off for six years – that, or beat the ever loving crap out of – nearly the whole world with under three percent commissioned officers. Roman legions, perhaps the most formidable fighting machines of human history, got by with six to eight. Six to eight percent? Not on your life; six to eight, period, six military tribunes, a legate, and – arguably – the praefectus castrorum, who was more in the line of a late entry officer, as per the British system. Think about that one, one officer per every eight hundred men. And it was plenty.
What have we got? As of 2013 we had over eleven percent commissioned in the Marine Corps, seventeen percent in the Navy, almost nineteen percent in the Army, and nearly twenty percent of strength being commissioned officers in the Air Force.
The problems with having this many officers are multifold. I can only cover some of the more important ones.
This high a percentage of officers almost certainly means that there are people running around with bars and leaves and even eagles and perhaps stars who probably should have been non-coms. They may have the education and intelligence to be officers, but as a matter of attitude, outlooks, values, and approaches to things, they’d have been happier if they’d been wearing multiple stripes. I used to see a lot of this among lieutenants who decided to go Special Forces. In almost every case I have seen, these were guys who really wanted to be squad leaders which, in SF, they could be. The effect of commissioning so high a percentage of people has tended to be having an NCO corps weaker than it should have been and weaker than it needs to be. This tends to exacerbate another problem, officers will tend to micromanage if they’re allowed to. They will be allowed to, if there is a common perception that the NCO corps needs to be micromanaged, which, because some numbers actually do need to be micromanaged, casts them all in a questionable light in some circles. There’s another reason, one having little or nothing whatsoever to do with NCOs, for that kind of micro-management.
Tom Kratman, “There Are No Bad Regiments…”, Everyjoe.com, 2015-10-12.
September 17, 2017
American military command and control, as adopted by the Canadian military
Ted Campbell explains why he feels the complex and cumbersome system used by the US Army (and derived from the US experience of raising, training, and running a vast army in WW2) is not well suited to the much smaller Canadian Army, yet has become the “way things are done” in Canada:
The problem, as I see it, with the American command and control system is that it is totally systematic. This is born, to some degree, out of the practical necessity that the US faced in the 1940s when it fielded a force of over 15 million men and women but it, systematic management, became something akin to a cult when Robert McNamara, who had been a pioneer of systems analysis in the US Army Air Corps in World War II and was recruited to be one of Henry Ford II’s Whiz Kids who would use those tools to help reshape American industry in early the post war years, became President John Kennedy’s Secretary of Defence (1961 to 1968). He reshaped the US military using systematic management as his main tool. It works for the administrative management of very, very large organizations … it, American style systematic management, may not work as well as many would hope, but it can, and did, bring order, to a very large enterprise. But it stifles individuality and initiative, which are essential for command ~ even, I have read, American unconventional forces are forced into a very conventional systematic matrix.
Systematic management requires a great deal of rote learning and adherence to doctrine. There is a “school solution’ to every problem and that is the one that second lieutenants and lieutenant generals, alike, are required to offer … there is little room for, say, a Robert Rogers, T.E. Lawrence, Orde Wingate or David Sterling … and, in fact, even the missions of the much discussed US Seal Team 6 seem carefully managed by check lists and risk analysis and other tool of the systems analysts. The notion, as one American special forces commander had, for example, of using local animal transport in Afghanistan in 2001, remains unpopular: systems analysis says that only the latest technology can be employed and officers who break the rules do not become generals because riding horses, rather then helicopters, is not the “school solution.” The fact that it worked didn’t really matter because it violated the process.
Why does Canada follow along, uncritically?
First: we, our military, has long had a “colonial” mindset. Until the 1950s we were, for most intents, a sub-set of the British military. It went beyond “buttons and bows” (scarlet mess jackets and the same rank badges, and so on) and included important traditions, like the regimental system, tactical doctrine and equipment. Canadian officers, especially, served, often, in the British Army, in jobs up to and including (during my service) a Canadian major general serving as commander of a British division that was “on the front line” in West Germany, and attended British training courses. In the 1970s we began to shift, more and more, to be a sub-set of the American military and many Canadian generals have served in senior (but generally powerless) “exchange” postings as deputy commanders of large American formations. They come home deeply influenced by the “American way.” The same things happen to Australian and British generals. The American aim is to have all its allies adopt its systematic approach which will make interoperability (by which the US means doing what they want their way) simpler. Exchange postings, as they are called, with other forces are never bad things, not even when the lessons we learn are the wrong ones … IF we understand what we are learning. My complaint with Canadians serving in senior “exchange” posts with the US military is that the post are less about exchanging information and ideas (learning from each other) and more about indoctrinating Canadians (and Australians and Brits) with US ideas about command and control and organization and management which, to my mind, anyway, are less than useful.
August 16, 2017
QotD: Management
I am no great admirer of management as a science or of managers as people. The latter tend to speak a strange language, a jargon neither elegant nor poetic; they buy very dull books at airports, they are often shifty and ruthless, and they seem to me to live in a constant condition of bad faith. They are bureaucrats pretending to be entrepreneurs even when they work for the state, an organization that secures its solvency by the simple expediency of printing more money — in fact, not even by printing it anymore, simply by adding a few naughts on computer screens. We live in a regime of paper money without the paper.
Presumably most managers want to be managers; it is their ambition to become such, though some, I think, are sucked into management from other activities without a full realization of what is happening to them. At any rate, they soon come to have a sense of importance and entitlement by comparison with everyone else in society, even the nominal owners of the enterprise in which they work, for they believe themselves to be doing the world’s real work, as it were. James Burnham, in his book The Managerial Revolution, pointed this out as long ago as 1941:
The managers’ training as administrators of modern production naturally makes them think in terms of co-ordination, integration, efficiency, planning; and to extend such terms from the realm of production under their immediate direction to the economic process as a whole. When the managers think about it, the old-line capitalists, sunning themselves in Miami and Hawaii or dabbling in finance, appear to them as parasites, having no justifiable function in society….
They therefore appropriate shareholders’ funds (or public money) with a good conscience, reasoning that without them there would be no such funds in the first place.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Flying Off the Handle”, Taki’s Magazine, 2015-10-10.
February 23, 2017
QotD: Government failure is baked-in
One can build a very good predictive model of government agency behavior if one assumes the main purpose of the agency is to maximize its budget and staff count. Yes, many in the organization are there because they support the agency’s public mission (e.g. protecting the environment at the EPA), but I can tell you from long experience that preservation of their staff and budget will almost always come ahead of their public mission if push comes to shove.
The way, then, to punish an agency is to take away some staff and budget. Nothing else will get their attention. Unfortunately, in most scandals where an agency proves itself to be incompetent or corrupt or both (e.g. IRS, the VA, more recently with OPM and their data breaches) the tendency is to believe the “fix” involves sending the agency more resources. Certainly the agency and its supporters will scream “lack of resources” as an excuse for any problem.
And that is how nearly every failing government agency is rewarded for their failure, rather than punished. Which is why our agencies fail so much.
Warren Meyer, “Congress Almost Always Rewards Failed Government Agencies. Here is Why”, Coyote Blog, 2015-06-17.
