How Bureaucrats Act

On the military theme, this Post article shows even Army lifers don't get and follow the message.  A brigade commander refused to follow the counterinsurgency doctrine associated with Gen. Petraeus and instead used the "search and destroy" doctrine associated, in my mind at least, with Gen. Westmoreland and Vietnam.

And Joel Achenbach of the Post, who has a book out on the BP well disaster, writes of learning, or relearning:

One thing I learned doing my book reasearch is that people don’t actually read reports. They don’t read their emails and they are not always in the loop. The one fella over here doesn’t know what the fella over there knows. If I were in charge of things, I’d make sure that any really critical piece of information was posted in the elevators and bathrooms.

You have to remember that people don’t behave the way they are supposed to behave. More generally, executives and managers and decision-makers need to remember that the military truism about battle plans (they don’t survive contact with the enemy) is true of most things in life. A plan is a good thing to have, to be sure, but you have to accept the fact that it will be abandoned in crunch time (and later mocked in the media).