B. U. G. S.

Excellent assessment! Now you know what my job description is. Hey, it’s a job somebody’s got to do. In this case, it turns out to be me. I’m having a world of fun. I hope you are having the same quantity of fun.

Comment by joe rorke

MY REPLY:

It’s nice to see you say you’re enjoying yourself, and I know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t feel your were getting were time’s worth.

Once again, your use of the term “job description” made me remember something that impressed me a long time ago. The man who took over Avis Rent-A-Car and made it such a success wrote a how-to book called “Up the Organization..” With the pun, he had a l0ok on his face on the cover. But the book wa actually a very short collectionof points about running an organization.

One of his points that really got to me was about “job description.” Remember that the the per capita income at that time was about a third what it is today — in dollars — and he said he could not believe that companies would write job descriptions in advertising to hire people at over over 50,000 a year. If someone is getting paid at that level, he said, hire them and they will find their job description or out they go.

Then it occurred to me that, inhte case of each executive who had been th the company for a few years, you might be able to describe generally what they did. That would be a job description, too. In my terms, hiring a high-level exec with a description of what he WILL do is a job PREscription. What I wrote for Joe was a job DEScription. I am not telling him what to do. I am describing what he does do.

So, Joe, you don’t have to worry about being fired. But if you get to be a smartass I might cut your salary.

I don’t want to correct the term job descritpion, just to make this point.

It’s sort of like the vague irritation I get from the word “aristorcracy.” The word means rule by the aristos, the best. I defy anyone to say that the groveling clowns with titles today are the best of anything. Or that that enslaved (which was the declared purpose of Versailles) silk-pants-wearing wimps of Versailles constituted the best of anything. Louis XIV built the place to keep those clowns under his thumb. But that is what people like Buckley think of when they say “aristocrat” today.

As in the case of job description and job prescription, I have my own word, which I do not try to force on anybody, for this distinction. The word aristocracy as used means rule by birth, not by talent or gifts and least of all of noblesse oblige. Nobody sells white Britain out like the Queen. So the actual meaning of the word is naciocracy.

See all the thinking Joe makes me do? I don’t think I’ll cut his salary THIS week.