Monday 26 November 2007

100 days

I always shudder when a new manager comes along with a bucketload of ideas and energy and wants to implement all sorts of changes in their first few months.

The results are invariably the same. Long hours, chaotic scenes as competing priorities are prioritised and re-prioritised, angry meetings as managers fight over the scarce resources required to do their bit, and in the end, nothing really changes. It's like stirring up a pond. All this mud and crap rises to the surface and then it settles down again and the fish go back to doing whatever it is that fish do.

I therefore dreaded our new PM announcing that he wants to do lots of stuff in his first 100 days. Mate, better to sit back and relax and do it in a calm and measured manner, rather than trying to blast also sorts of new stuff into the system. One reason why this "100 days" stuff never works is because of a lack of follow up. If you throw too many initiatives into the pot at once, you can't devote much time to each, so if your staff just decide to sit around and do stuff all on a few of them, it's never noticed and they can get away with it. You never get time to go back and revisit those issues, because sure as eggs, some crisis will come up and that will distract everyone for a while.

This just tells me how unready for government Labor really are. They've got no idea.

Ah well. Don't blame me. I didn't vote for them.

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