From the Ground Up
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2004 @ 3:14 pm
Filed Under Bureaucrats
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In my experience, absolutely no bureaucractic entity (yuck, jowo--don't talk like that!) is truly created from the ground up. There's always an organizational context, a political context, legacy data, system integration issues, staffing issues--and it's impossible (and rarely desirable) to remove those contexts and continuities from the new organization's environment. On the other hand, the usual object is to move the organizational focus, which is nearly always gainful (and painful).
Memories of Suite Judy Blue Eyes
Posted on Tuesday, February 24, 2004 @ 9:01 pm
Filed Under Army Career, Bureaucrats, Stateside, Stories
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Bought a copy of the original CS&N album from iTunes yesterday, and am listening at work. Suddenly it's 1970, and I'm back at Fort Huachuca. Amazing.
Pepys: of diaries and bureaucracies
Posted on Monday, December 1, 2003 @ 7:42 am
Filed Under Bureaucrats, Readings
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Pepys was a delightful diarist, and worth reading for all sorts of reasons. One which (naturally) appeals to me is that he was a professional bureaucrat in a time when bureaucracies were new to European government. Bureaus were small, too; they seem to have run the Royal Navy with just a handful of clerks. (I seem to be ignoring the admirals....) Part of the fun when I read Pepys is watching him feel his way around the organizational issues.
(mis)Measures: a Vietnam story
Posted on Sunday, October 26, 2003 @ 1:42 am
Filed Under Army Career, Bureaucrats, Stories, Vietnam, Work
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Truth told, neither the CWO nor my TC cared a lot about the errors, except they looked bad in our reports. Both superiors knew I'd made one error and repeated it fourteen times (the double-count was a reporting artifact). They also knew that it would show as 28 errors on the computerized reports, and (near as any of us could tell) those reports were the main method Saigon used to evaluate CommCenter operations. They issued performance rankings based on those counts....
Twenty Six Years
Posted on Friday, October 24, 2003 @ 1:21 am
Filed Under Bureaucrats, Joel, Stories
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I'm still here....
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