--- "Robert J. Chassell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Last February, the former chief of staff of the US > Army claimed > otherwise. He figured an additional 250,000 > Americans could go into > Iraq.
I frankly don't think Shinsecki was write about this, and I don't know anyone else who agrees with that assessment. Even if it was true, though, there's a big difference between putting that number of soldiers in Iraq, and that number of civilians in Baghdad. The CPA is staffed by civilians - guys like me at the lower levels, basically, and diplomats and ex-military officers at the upper ranks. > Of course, the amount of work to be done is > effectively limitless. > That is why management has to be concerned about > fatigue and has to > take steps to prevent reduction of good judgement. They do, but they have to balance that with getting the job done. A lot of well-run companies put those sorts of demands on their employees. Every consulting company (not just us), every investment bank, every venture capital fund, every hedge fund - and that's just in the financial sector. I've seen our clients in the pharma sector routinely do 80 hour weeks. Pretty much every CEO in America does that. Time and motion study of Congressmen and Senators suggest that 80 hours is a _light_ week for them. Anecdotally Cabinet Members say the same thing - I don't know that a formal study has ever been done, but that's how they describe their lives. In the military I know that junior officers in combat zones routinely work those types of hours for months - or even years - on end. My old boss was a platoon commander in Vietnam, and he worked 100 hour weeks for two years. So the argument that a well-run organization doesn't ask its people to do that is empirically contradicted - any number of well-run (and highly successful) organizations _do_, in fact, run at that sort of tempo. It's true that _pilots_ in particular are prohibited from doing so, but that's because the fine motor skills that pilots require are the first thing affected by fatigue. I can stumble over door sills and still build financial models quite effectively. > What you are saying here is in the 250 days since > 2003 May 1, the US > administration has not figured out that the > Americans, outside the > military, in Bagdad are working so many hours they > are making, at > times, mistakes that they would not make normally. > Or else you are > saying that the mistakes they are making are not > relevant to the cost > of the war or to its ultimate outcome. No, I'm saying that I disagree with your cause and effect linkage. Experience and anecdote both tell me that the fact that people are working as hard as they are is not a sign of poor management, because the best managed organizations in the world work that way. If people were working nine-to-five, I'd be concerned. This is not a nine-to-five setting. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
