From the Washington Note comes this tidbit about what it's like for the folks in Obama's business and economic brain trust to try to see either the president or his chief of staff.
I asked one of them who I assume can get through to the President or at least to Rahm Emanuel any time he wants why he doesn't make his case more clearly to the occupants of the White House. The response was, "Yes, I can get through to Rahm Emanuel any time, but I get three minutes with him, and then someone else gets their three minutes, and so on. Rahm is the three minute guy -- and he's great during those three minutes."This is bad medicine. I spent about three years (it felt like 30) working for a guy like this. I was one of only four people on his staff and I used to measure the amount of time I spent with him in seconds per week. We ran a 600-person, $400M enterprise. I was in charge of marketing and business development. I once calculated that including conversations we had in the hall while he was rushing off to another meeting, I had 300 seconds per week alone with him. It was insanity.
I left the organization before he did and when he left it was in ruins. Consider what kinds of things you can accomplish in 3 minutes. You can empty the dishwasher, you can take out the trash, you can read an email or two and you can fold some laundry. You cannot manage an organization in 3 minute chunks.
When I was still working for The Rodent (as I used to call him), I spent some time at home researching how quickly the brain can transition from one task to another. It turns out that the more complicated the task, the longer it takes your brain to internally restructure it's connections to deal with it. Recalling memories, resetting your mental pathways to recreate the last time you thought about it, all of it takes time. I figured that in my interactions with The Rodent, he never completely understood what I was saying because his brain never had the time to reset itself to prepare for the discussion.
If Rahm is doing things in 3-minute segments, then he isn't accomplishing anything at all except getting some kind of endorphin high from all of the attention and excitement around him.
6 comments:
I guess that's why we have hierarchies - done properly, nobody will have to deal with more than one boss, and four underlings, and so will be able to give each of them as much time as necessary.
Of course, you will always have the problem with *everybody* wanting to talk to the Top Boss, so he needs some sort of weeding mechanism. I can see where it would be sensible to set up, say, an hour a day where you deal with the "horde" in 3 minute increments, basically giving them a head-pat and sending them back to work. Then, the rest of the day is spend with the 5 people that he actually *works* with.
I don't know that Emanuel is doing that, but he is if he has any sense. It's pretty much what my boss does, and it works for him.
Cupcake, you are a certified batsh*t crazy wingnut nutjob. You are one of those morons who believes we should teach "intelligent design" in school. Please, keep flipping burgers. It's all you are qualified for. You are one sad, pathetic excuse for a human. PS: Benny Hinn is a fraud, as is every other televangelist, priest, pastor etc. The Earth is 4.5 Billion years old. Dinosaurs existed. Man evolved from lower life forms. These are scientific facts. "God" is a myth designed and invented to control morons like you.
Maybe the president should be limited to three minutes of public exposure every day. Look at the chart of the Dow and you can see exactly when he started his presser with Gordon Brown.
And no, I'm not the anonymous who posted that last comment...
First Anon, thanks for the information! I'll look into these "dinosaur" things you speak of. As I understand it, the world is only 6 hours old and exists only in my mind.
I could be wrong.
Captch word (irnoy alert): "dinexsta" - a dinosaur dietary supplement. As in, "Lose those unwanted feet off of your waistline and drop more than 300# in just two weeks with Dinexsta!"
That was supposed to be an irony alert. And also Captcha word. What can I say? I've only existed for about 6 hours and I've got the entire Universe to control.
Being a reasonable sort of person, Anon. #1 has obviously seen the flaws in the Intelligent Design biogenesis school of thought and traded it in for the Unintelligently Designed mythogenesis school of thought. It's a new mathemagical model being promoted from within the cross-disciplinary convergence of Marxist Ecofeminism and Homeopathic Social Studies.
The teachers' unions should be promoting it for the federally subsidized pre-K indoctrination sessions beginning next fall, as authorized in the Stimulus Bill.
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