SIEGECRAFT: DELEGATION | nationalsalvation.net
Everybody understands an angry young man. Nobody has any use for an angry OLD man. You never get over anger, but tantrums and nastiness in an old man makes one a bit ill, while one expects some outbursts in a newer model.
As one gets older, one begins to really understand what one commenter said here "once and for all," man's activities are just as much a part of nature as a bird's. The distinction between artificial and natural is useful in our language, but now it has become little but an advertisement for guilt.
As one gets more mature, one empathizes that complaining about human nature is exactly as logical as complaining about gravity. You don't have tantrums about gravity above the age of three. You learn to overcome it and you learn to use it. But an engineer who sat around bitching about gravity the way preachers and social scientists bitch about human nature would promptly get his strait jacket.
We allow people to cry about gravity until maybe age three. With young people we allow it into the twenties. After that, we begin to wish there were a better supply of strait jackets.
My methods of delegation got enormous RESULTS. But they are not the key to success, least of all inside the Beltway. I get the best people here. My operating system is out of sight professional. I had two people in DC offer to work for me for the same reason: The best people LOVE to be handed a job with full responsibility by a boss who knows he would screw it up at least as much as they do.
The best want to run with it, not to be checking every comma with the Boss. But they are working hard, and they expect their boss to do the same. They want him available when THEY need a checkout, because the checks back with HQ are few and important.
Which leads me back to anger management? I got the best people, I got stupendous results, and very few people wanted to hire me. When I got past the anger, I began to realize that this was WHY my methods were so EFFECTIVE. No one else was doing what I did!
So I was upset that no one else was doing what I did, which was why I had power. Which meant I was bitching about the reason I had power. That's Step One.
Step 2 is that you are bitching about GRAVITY. Your boss got his promotions in a system where NOBODY did what I did. If Ashbrook had been the average boss, he would have been a Senator. Instead, the REPUBLICAN Ohio legislature tried to redistrict him out of office three times by adding Democratic areas to his district and taking out his base vote. Not only did he overcome this, but also his last electoral percentage was 73%.
But John was known as "the loose cannon." He would not kiss up, he did what he thought was right, to an astonishing degree. He was on his way to the Senate when he "died."
So my methods of delegation WORK, but they are NOT a key to occupational success.