Johanna Rothman has a nice post about why people with responsibilities need assistants. As she points out, most organisations have been stripping out administrative support except for the most exalted positions, which makes sense until one looks at the bigger picture. Is it really better that people who are supposed to be busy with activities that generate income for the company spend their time filling in orders for stationery?
One of my (multiple) rants is about my brief experience at Digital Corp’s late Systems Research Center. Their technical recruiting was pretty tough but so, I guess, was their recruitment for all the other staff. They had the best administration staff I’ve ever seen. They would perpetrate unprovoked acts of forethought and helpfulness when you weren’t looking, same with the system administrators.
This works on all sorts of levels. First, if you’ve just spent a great deal of effort recruiting top-class researchers, it doesn’t make sense to have them spend time battling the corporate bureaucracy. Second, and deeper, the ethos in the building was that stuff would just work, so the technical staff would not be diverted from their real jobs—and, by implication, there would be no excuses for not doing good work. In contrast, at another international research lab, it took me months to get my expenses paid because the relevant administrator could not figure out which way exchange rates worked (more Dollars than Pounds at the time).
Like many such systems, it’s hard to understand or believe how much of a difference getting things right makes until you’ve experienced it; I expect this is how it feels at a first-rate Toyota plant. The rest of us have to learn to cope with the Gumption Traps waiting for us in the “real” world. In the distance, we hear the Siren call of the Pragmatic Fix.
