Dreadnought Castle<\/p>\n
Jan 12, 2015<\/p>\n
Dear Friends,<\/p>\n
Recently, while perusing through many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, I came upon the following little tale. After reading it, it occurred to me that it might have application to recent events in our national government, especially in the mazes and complexities of our federal, bureaucratic agencies, which seem to be intruding into our lives ever increasingly. I thought you might enjoy it.<\/p>\n
I remain yours, most apocalyptically,<\/p>\n
The Gray Ghost<\/p>\n
_____________________<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A TALE OF BUREAUCRATIC EXCELLENCE<\/p>\n
Copyright 2015 \u00a9 by Joe Wilkins<\/p>\n
Once upon a time, in a land far away, in a quiet corner of the world, there lived a King who viewed himself as a kind and sincere man. All the neighboring kings said he was very bright and energetic– after all, he had a degree from Harvard Law School! However, behind his back they also said he was too ambitious. \u201cAfter all,\u201d they said, \u201cyou\u2019re already king of an entire country! What else could you possibly want?\u201d<\/p>\n
However, the King did want more. You see, his was a special kind of country, one where all the sick and disabled people, and wayward immigrants from around the world, came for help to start a new life.\u00a0 As a result, the King and his Court welcomed all these people with great enthusiasm; for, you see, they had a special mission: they really believed that they could help all of these unfortunate people. The King further believed that he could help them so much, that they would all be able to get good jobs and work! Oh, how wonderful a king he was!<\/p>\n
But, alas, the King\u2019s country was too limited to accomplish these goals; the government was burdened with a national debt of $17,000,000,000, and the borders were being flooded by endless streams of new immigrants, while all the poor, indigenous citizens were depleting the Federal coffers even further. Soon, the King noticed that very few of these people were going to work. Moreover, that worried him\u2014as kings are wont to do in such situations. Finally, after much thoughtful deliberation, the King concluded that his Royal Management Techniques weren\u2019t working After all, the current techniques, which he had inherited from his father, were outdated. It was time to update them!<\/p>\n
So, off the King went to Soothsayer University to consult with Merlin, his great, liberal advisor. Merlin listened to the King\u2019s lamentations for days on end, and pondered laboriously over his ancient books of awesome lore. Finally, in an obscure and ancient tome, In Search of Excellence<\/em>, he found the answer.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat you must do,\u201d Merlin announced to the King, \u201cis to adopt the most modern management techniques. Your problem has been that you are trying to run your royal government like a fiefdom\u2014whereas you should be running it like a business! <\/em>What you need to do is to implement a new management system that I\u2014in all my wisdom\u2014have devised for you: the Management Troll System. With this system, you can\u2019t fail. It incorporates all the latest technology. And better yet,\u201d Merlin added with a wry grin, \u201cit will cause the people to love<\/em> you!<\/p>\n The King was immensely pleased, because he so much liked being loved. So, he immediately implemented his new Management Troll System, which he was sure would gain him many warm fuzzies<\/em> from the people<\/p>\n Now, the key to this whole system, as you can well imagine, was the Trolls, little people who lived under bridges and such, and needed jobs themselves. They were assigned the duties of assisting these disadvantaged people by counseling, and getting them welfare benefits and government jobs. Each Troll was assigned a yearly quota of disadvantaged people to work with and was expected to get a certain percentage of them settled in and on the job.<\/p>\n Supervising the Trolls were the Troll Watchers and the Gnomes. Ruling over all of them was the King, who watched over everything from his palace balcony, using the most modern technology: a telescope and carrier pigeons. In addition, the King declared that all these people they were helping should henceforth be called Customers<\/em>, because he didn\u2019t want them to feel bad about all the unearned help they were getting.<\/p>\n Now, the Troll Watchers lived in the villages with the Trolls, so it was not hard for them to see what was going on. However, the Gnomes lived in the palace dungeon, so they had to use periscopes to see what was happening in the outside world. Moreover, it was the Gnomes job, under the new Management Troll System, to take orders from the King and tell the Troll Watchers what to do as they went about helping all these people they were assigned.<\/p>\n Thus, the king and the dungeoned Gnomes devised the bureaucratic specifics of the Management Troll System. Then they published these procedures on 436,856 scrolls of sheepskin parchment (which, incidentally, caused a severe shortage of mutton) and distributed the scrolls throughout the kingdom. Then, on October 1st<\/sup> the complete Management Troll System was implemented with great expectations.<\/p>\n At first, everyone was happy, because they all had great hopes. At the very least, the Trolls hoped for some workload relief. But it was clear that the system wasn\u2019t working like it was supposed to. The Customers began screaming louder for their rights and wanted increased benefits. Before long, the harassed and overworked Trolls began quitting and getting jobs in neighboring countries–if they were unable to wrangle a Troll Watcher or Gnome job. However, the records that they were required to keep on all their activities with the Customers had gotten more complicated and burdensome. For example, whereas the Trolls initially memorized important information about their Customers, the King, for some unaccountable reason, became fearful that the Trolls would forget all this precious information, so he required them to write out all their actions on sheepskin parchment (further depleting the flocks). Further, to protect the Customers\u2019 confidentiality, this recording had to be done in invisible ink, which was lemon juice. Thus, if a Troll wanted to read his own parchments he had to send a message to the palace by carrier pigeon, to ask the Royal Furnace Stokers to come around to fire up the file ovens so the parchment could be heated and the invisible ink writing made visible. After reading the files, the records had to be re-copied in new invisible writing and then re-filed. Then, the remaining legible files were burned<\/p>\n Now, the Furnace Stokers were scheduled to go to each Troll\u2019s office once a month, but they kept getting so many carrier pigeon emergency calls from the over- burdened Trolls, that they couldn\u2019t keep their regular schedules.\u00a0 On those rare occasions when they did get to a Troll\u2019s office for a regularly scheduled visit, invariably the Troll in question would be out to lunch, or working in the community somewhere. Further complicating this delicately balanced communication-service-delivery system, were the numerous outlaw, pigeon hunters who roamed the land, killing the birds for their dinner tables. Said one pigeon hunter, when captured by the King\u2019s game warden, and asked why he was killing the pigeons, \u201cWhere\u2019s the mutton?\u201d<\/p>\n Well, the situation got worse and productivity dropped even more. So the King decided that to get increased production of improved Customers, he would offer a Troll Incentive Pay Plan, something that had never been done in fiefdom before. Therefore, he formed a task force committee of Trolls, and told them, \u201cTrolls, I want you to get together and figure out a system that will reward the energetic and bright Trolls who helped the most Customers. This way we\u2019ll get our production back up, I can be proud of you again, and you Trolls can earn a few extra shekels!\u201d<\/p>\n A timid Troll in the group was puzzled and stammered, \u201cBut your Excellence, why don\u2019t you just go ahead and give a modest cash bonus to each Troll who gets a Customer a job?\u201d<\/p>\n The King, unaccustomed to being questioned, suppressed his anger, and smiled in benevolent, condescension saying, \u201cMy son, you don\u2019t seem to understand. Such a simple solution will never work in my increasingly complex kingdom. Haven\u2019t you read Megatrends<\/em>, written by my teen-aged son, Prince-Know-All? If you had, you\u2019d know that solutions to today\u2019s and tomorrow\u2019s problems must be, what I call, forecasting solutions, whereby we take into careful consideration past, present, and future events, whilst carefully considering the physical, social, psychological, and spiritual ramifications, integrating all these variables into our Management Troll System. Then we cross check all this with our learned Astrologer, Starman, to see if it\u2019s going to work\u2026 Further, I want to make sure that all Trolls are an integral part of this decision-making process. This is what I call participative management.\u201d The King paused and looked at the Troll benevolently, then finished his oration with, \u201cSee how just and democratic I am!\u201d<\/p>\n So the King\u2019s task force went forth to work, spending a year devising a good, behaviorally-oriented incentive pay system. When it was finished, it was presented to the King and his Court (during the royal softball game). And everyone was pleased. However, his personal aide and counselor, Killery Hinton\u00a0 suggested that it needed to be field-tested in a remote part of the kingdom, where few would know what was happening, just to make sure it would work, because if anything dysfunctional happened, his Excellence would be blamed, putting his excellent reputation at great risk.<\/p>\n The King agreed, so the Troll Incentive Pay System was field-tested in a remote part of the Kingdom for three years. However, by that time, everyone had lost interest in the project, and the King himself forgot about it because of more pressing problems.<\/p>\n The King and the Gnomes had recently noted that the people pouring into the kingdom were more disabled, sick, or poorer than ever before. Moreover, more and more of them did not want to go to work. Instead, they preferred to remain on the royal \u201cwelfare robes.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, the Trolls knew that these people were never going to go to work\u2014ever. However, the King, in his excellent vision, felt otherwise. \u201cTo get these sicker people off the royal welfare robes, we must improve our Troll\u2019s job performance.\u201d<\/p>\n However, nothing was done about Troll salaries, workloads, labor relations, working conditions, public relations, employee attitudes, or the quality of the newly hired Trolls and Troll-Watchers.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are all problems, of course,\u201d the King agreed, \u201cbut everyone has these problems, so we mustn\u2019t be crybabies. To improve our efficiency, we must bite the arrow! We must become more excellent.\u201d So the King initiated a new campaign to make all the Trolls more excellent.<\/p>\n At the core of the plan was a scheme to retrain the Trolls to work faster, and to re-train the Troll-Watchers to better plan their jobs. The King assigned this training to a specialized group of Gnomes who were\u00a0 off in a corner of the dungeon, and they were called the Neo Royal Trainers. They were ex-Trolls, who, after beginning their Troll work, found they could no longer bear to look upon the pitiful Customers. Since they were no longer any good at direct service delivery, the King in his usual benevolent, understanding excellence, took pity upon them and \u201ckicked them upstairs\u201d into jobs where they had to teach those below what they didn\u2019t know how to do themselves. The King said, \u201cThose that can\u2019t do, should teach.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, when the Royal Trainers got the call from the King to initiate his newest plan, they were ecstatic, because they had been in the dungeon for years, with nothing to do. Finally, they were onstage!<\/p>\n So, the Royal Trainers went forth into the kingdom full of enthusiasm\u2014and other things\u2014trying to train all the working Trolls. However, the Trainers were puzzled when all the Trolls kept falling asleep in the training sessions. This deviant behavior was reported to the King and his Court, and they concluded that all the Trolls must either be coming down with the sleeping plague, developing alcohol and drug problems, or bringing their personal problems to work!<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we need is a Troll Assistance Program, \u201cthe King declared. So he designated I. M. Ugly, a Gnome in the north castle tower as the person who would work with these troubled Trolls who fell asleep. Mr. Ugly had been in the tower twenty years, doing highly specialized work for the King, counting the number of daily carrier pigeon flights. Therefore, the King considered him eminently qualified to be a counselor to the Trolls.<\/p>\n But, alas, no one ever came to see Mr. Ugly for help with his excellent assistance, because the Trolls knew that if anyone saw them going to his tower for help, then everyone would\u00a0 know how dysfunctional they really were, and they might get fired. Because of this, the Troll Assistance Program was also soon forgotten.<\/p>\n Predictively, the King continued to note the increasingly, lowered production from his Trolls. He pondered mightily what he should do. Then one day, as he sat naked in his bath, it came to him. Excited, he jumped out of the bath, ran naked throughout the castle, shouting, \u201cEureka, I\u2019ve got it!\u201d Well, the Queen did not like that behavior at all, and scorned him mightily for exposing himself before all the innocent young maidens entrusted to her care.<\/p>\n But the King, as usual, was unfazed. It was simple: to get more production from the Trolls, all that was needed was to have them work longer. The King\u2019s Court was sore amazed at his excellent brilliance when they hear his new plan.<\/p>\n Thus, the King issued a new decree throughout the land. Each day was hereby increased to 32 hours, with an additional eight hours added to the Trolls workday, bringing it up to 16. Even better, the Trolls still retained the same number of hours as always for their own personal lives and activities.<\/p>\n As the King thought about his latest management achievement, he thought, \u201cNow that\u2019s the way to achieve EXCELLENCE!\u201d<\/p>\n THE END<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dreadnought Castle Jan 12, 2015 Dear Friends, Recently, while perusing through many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, I came upon the following little tale. After reading it, it occurred to me that it might have application to … Continue reading