OMG!!!! Ear porn!
“A committee has often been described as a cul-de-sac down which good ideas are lured and then quietly strangled,” said Gen. Ronald Keys, commander of Air Combat Command, during a panel discussion with top Air Force generals in Washington.“My thought is let’s put somebody in charge of this, let’s hold him accountable, and let’s see if he can’t sort this out,” he said.
Yah Keys may run the Air Force’s premier command, but he’s still in the minority. The Air Force hearts committees so much they may as well write a contract for Hallmark to poetically scribe their love for the things on a pretty pink card with a white lace trim.
Trying to think of the dude who said that committees are groups of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.
Committees are the intellectual afterbirth of bureaucrats who can’t make a decision. They’re popular in big clunky organizations like corporations, the government, and the military because forming a committee is a leader’s surefire, never-fail strategy to weasel out of accountability. They guarantee that no stigma for bad calls end up in the permanent performance file.
So what happens? Agile thinkers, improvisers, and folks who just plain make smart decisions find that their prudence isn’t the stratifier that it once was. Committees enable bad leaders to rise to the top, while the innovators tread water. Drinking the bureaucratic kool-aid is the only way to get ahead these days.
Unless you’re in combat.
But what about the other 90% of the military?
Committees suck.
Oh yeah, the article is about UAVs or something.
Another good committee analogy goes something like, “A camel is a horse built by committee.”
Committee’s are also a favored way of distributing the largesse of a bureaucratic budget. A favorite saying of my own is that a sure-fire way to ruin the Marine Corps would be to give them the budget of the Air Force.
Bureaucrats would suddenly appear from the woodwork, committee’s would form as if by magic, and new departments would spring up to justify the new budgetary need for an office of strategic management and redeployment of odd-sized paper clips.
At my company, committees are used to create the appearance of consensual or participatory decision making. The leaders will form a committee to create some new policy. After we go through a few months of work creating something they will do ahead and do whatever it was that they wanted to do in the first place. But of course the decision was all built upon the work of the committee.
(A vicious cycle: Leaders think that they have to do all of the work because the committees dont have good ideas. Workers who know that the committees are worthless so they just go through the motions because they know that the ideas wont be used)
At my company, in my particular organization, we don’t have committees.
And we get things done.
Makes me glad to be an engineer…(John, to you…:)).
A coworker was asking about my time in the Marines the other day in context to our civilian work atmosphere.
It may have differed elsewhere, but for the most part, at the unit level (squadron, company, etc) things were very efficient and equitable.
Outside of the immediate unit, things went horribly wrong though. It was like belonging to an underdepartment of the DMV. We went from amazing esprit de corps to “take a number and wait. . . to be screwed with.”
I haven’t yet seen that kind of disparity among departments in the corporate world, but I would still take the Marine life to civilian life any day.
A committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary. -Fred Allen
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/fredallen386010.html
Just found your excellent blog through a link from Vodkapundit and reference to your post on Blackwater. Great stuff!
My NCOIC had to practically physically restrain me back in the early 90s when the Air Force was trotting out another one of it’s “Quality Management” improvements. I don’t even remember what it was called, it came and went so quickly. The basic of it was that there would be no single responsible authority; the Commander would shove the situation off onto a committee, and then would implement the committee’s recommendation. At the end of the class, I very vocally stated that it was one of the most asinine programs I had ever heard a military organization attempt to implement. That the military, even the Air Force, wasn’t a fricking democracy, and actually needed fewer committees, and more officers and NCOs willing to accept responsibility and take charge. I wonder if that had anything to do with my not making E-8?