A couple of years ago BoardAd told me he was going to do a revamp on BUGS. I cleared it and forgot about it. BoardAd told me no more for months, choosing instead to work with pros like SysOps as he went ahead.

One day months later the old format was there. The next day the revamp happened, and I had to learn a lot of basic things again. I felt idiotic, but mostly I felt happy.

Can you imagine how the average vet pref or affirmative action small-time manager would have reacted to this?

“Why the HELL didn’t you keep me up with this?

Not me. I have never held a Big Title myself, but what I can do for you is to tell you what things are LIKE in the big leagues. I wasn’t the Big Guy, but I was senior staff.

The big guys expect staff to do it ALL, and it isn’t just because they’re being “My time is valuable” snobs.

Richard Nixon said that when he became President he misallocated his time at first. He had already been a congressman, a senator, and the Vice President of the United States, but he STILL took a while to realize how long it took him to realize the full importance of DELEGATING in that job.

Nixon said he spent one of his first nights in the White House worrying about an international civil aviation agreement that had reached his desk that day. Later, he had trouble believing he had done that. That agreement was reached by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) advising the State Department

The CAB was where I worked. We had a total of seven hundred employees. If the President tries to micromanage seven hundred Federal employees he will never sleep. The total regular civil service was two thousand times that many people, not to mention the Army, the Navy, and other folks.

When you get into the big leagues you must hire pros and let them do their jobs. I have psychological disabilities and have been a workaholic all my life. But I can get a lot done simply because micromanaging never even occurs to me. I was very happy to see BoardAd grab the initiative and run with it.

There is a new sentence at the top our main page. It says that anyone reading this should look at General Comments 5, which is where the news from the FRONT is.

Nice people will think this me being modest, pointing to other writers on Bob‘s site.. Actually, it is more valuable than that. It is me DELEGATING.

This is something the Old Man has to TEACH you: How we do it in the Big Leagues.

One General Comments 5 entry stated that he had read BUGS for six months before he went to GC5 and found it wasn’t just the Old Man’s Wisdom but a General Staff Center where those doing the fighting reported back to GC5.

That led me directly to this article.

Someone else in GC5 quoted a statement I must have made about how you need to take initiative: “In this war, if you don’t get orders, just go kill something.”

I read General Comments 5 closely. GC 5, at least so far, is people who are putting in the Mantra in places where they know it will be taken down. They don’t whine about censorship. Once you really get into this fight, you know that censorship becomes routine.

We are like other revolutionaries who would write on walls and put up signs in the dead of night in the full knowledge they will be erased and taken down in the morning.

This is exciting. This is ACTION.

Actually, delegation is not so much a matter of modesty as it is of GUTS. You have to take the heat when one of your people does something wrong. The micromanager is often just plain scared.

BUGS is small, but we are literally taking on the whole damned world.

There’s no room for micromanagement here.

Now go kill something.