Intelligence Wanted

For a while now, I’ve been telling people that the biggest problem with management in this country – and possibly in the rest of the world, too – is that people seem to believe that it can be accomplished with simple rules and procedures that do not require anyone involved to have a functional brain. It’s the mentality that leads to zero-tolerance rules, three-strikes laws, and similar idiocy; the fact that it’s easier to look up an set answer in a book and say “That’s the way it is” than to actually figure out an answer and take up a position. If we want to avoid the sort of decisions that would rather risk a 50 million gallon oil spill than spend $500,000 on a safety device or risk the collapse of our entire financial industry, economy and civilization rather than review basic loan applications, we’ve got to start seeing management as a profession and an active process. And I’ve rarely seen a better example of this principle than in a story that came up last week about a soldier wounded in Iraq who is being billed for losing his equipment…

You can check out the original story from the television station in his home town here if you want to, but the upshot is that this poor fellow had been issued a bunch of Army property (canteens, grenades, a tent, and so on) that was not turned in when he was hit by a sniper during a tour in Iraq and permanently disabled. There are regulations that require any soldier who can’t account for his gear to pay for whatever he doesn’t turn in – which is generally a good idea, as it keeps people from walking off with things you’d rather not lose (kitchens, computers, tanks) and then just saying “Oops!” when asked to account for them. But in this case we’re talking less than $3,000 worth of basic gear (plus interest) that was lost by a man who was wounded in action and is still suffering from the after effects. It’s clearly not a case of anyone stealing valuable military equipment and selling it on the black market – unless you’re an Army accountant, it would appear…

Now, there is an appeal process, and the soldier in our story has filed the paperwork to explain what happened to his gear and request that the Army stop billing him for it, but they’re insisting they never got it and they can’t let him off the hook anyway. If this sounds like something you’ve read about online (or in this space) with cell phone companies billing for services a customer doesn’t have or cable companies billing people for premium channels they never had and then refusing to remove the charges or admit they ever got the paperwork, that’s probably because it’s exactly the same syndrome. Anyone who has ever worked for a large organization already knows that a bureaucracy is only as capable as its least intelligent member, and the only way to prevent this sort of foul-up from turning into a major humiliation (with millions of people all over the Internet calling you and your agency fools and idiots) is for an actual manager to make an actual decision and take an actual stand – unlike the Army officials in this story…

It’s probably also worth noting that the time when you generally see this kind of non-thinking is when the organization in question is already in trouble – and that if our various Asian quagmires continue on the way we’re going, the Army is going to have more and more trouble convincing anyone to join up. Especially if word gets around that after you get shot and disabled they’re going to hold you up for money…