One of the best management books I ever read was written by Robert Townshend, the man who made Avis Rent-A-Car a success. The booklet was short and it was blunt. Its title was “Up the Organization.”

One of his best points was talking about writing “Job Description”: for hiring high-level employees. His point was that you do NOT pay that kind of money to somebody who NEEDS a Job Description!

I have repeatedly described the changeover in the Federal Government from being run by Supergrades. A Supergrade was where someone had a career ladder all the way from private to general in the Editing Department, the Auditing bureaucracy, or some particular specialty.

A bureaucrat world start as an apprentice printer at GS-2, say, and go up each rank until he was above GS-15.  GS-16, 17 and the top one, GS-18, was called a Supergrade.

Each rank in each specialty came with a detailed job description.

This made putting GS-16 printers in charge of a publishing area a nightmare. By the time you got to 16, you had to be more than a superintending printer or supervisory accountant.

The Senior Executive Service (SES) ended that. Now if you are Senior Management, above GS-15, your job is being an EXECUTIVE, not a specialist.

In SES you can, and often do, go straight from organizing military operations to supervising a department for buying butter wholesale.

There is No Job Descriptions above  GS-15, which is the same as a Colonel.

So I do not give you job descriptions. That, as Townshend says, is for people who cannot figure out their own place in what is to be done.

I am NOT going to take BUGS back two generations.

Yes, we full BUGSERS are “all chiefs and no Indians.”

That is why I vaguely described my job on Capitol Hill as “Senior Staff.”

I did EVERYTHING. Most real committee meetings see senior staffers asking witnesses questions.

Sorry about the TV shows, but the congressman has to be on the Floor and at two or three committee meetings. In fact it is the SUBCommittee meetings that really matter to most congressmen. That is where most of them have real clout or chairmanship.

There was not a lot of room for a senior staffer to a specific congressman if he couldn’t play Musical Chairs just like the Boss did. So the only name I could come up with was senior staffer. We used the term but I haven’t seen it written.

So BUGS is an interaction between learners and Senior Staff. Senior BUGSERS advise them. If they and senior BUGSERS can’t handle that, they are in the wrong place.

If you need advice, you learn the BUGSERS who can and will give it to you.

I got a Mother’s Day card with the Mantra in it.

From being alone for decades in my REAL fight, I now have people who know how to look for those base-level changes in dialogue that mean everything.

These are the things that make my day.

In my long, long, LONG experience, ninety percent of political effort has gone into hammering out — almost literally — a Statement of Principles and distributing offices.

In my long, long experiencing, damned few of those groups had anything left after that to DO anything with.

If you feel that BUGS is letting you down or not providing “leadership,” you should rethink those goals or go raise funds for somebody more high-powered than Old Bob.

You can’t be a BUGSER unless you do TWO things:
1) Learn what works by being out there doing it,
2) Learn how to look for those changes in dialogue that we are pushing for.
Real power has no End Game. “Revolutions eat their children.”

We are routinely accomplishing what was clearly impossible less than ten years ago.

That is impossible to understand unless you remember how things WERE then. There was no White Genocide. Sites did not routinely have to close their sites because an overwhelming majority of their readers talked about BUGS points.

That is because we were not here aiming at a Torch Light Parade on The Day.

To a BUGSER, that crap is for children.

Audio Bob – Part 1

 Audio Bob – Part 2