QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Thu 3rd February 2011, 1:01pm)
QUOTE(The Adversary @ Thu 3rd February 2011, 7:52am)
(And I´ll leave Gardner´s total over-sell of her own "achievements" on wikipedia: just a typical "climber" self-promotion that few would have reacted against if she had been a man (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) )
Have to disagree, there. Resume-padding may be common, but any male-dominated or technical organization has a way around it. There's a bull session, and it doesn't involve how many women you've slept with (or how many grandchildren you have). It's to find out if you can be trusted to hold up your end. So inquiry is made to see if you speak the lingo, how many base jumps you have, how many logged dives, how many hours of flying time and in what sorts of aircraft, what weapons have you qualified with, what is your batting average, how many class 5 climbs have you done, and where, did you ever lead anything above 5.1, and so on. Whatever the honest metric of competence is, in the task at hand. In this world-- the world of competence-driven authority, not formal organization-assigned authority-- Sue wouldn't last 10 minutes before being pegged as a poseur.
Does all of this correspond with "formal rank" in human organizations? No, indeed! The biggest friction in any organization is the basic friction between people who have the assigned authority to tell others what to do, and those people who SHOULD have it, by way of competence and experience. Wikipedia has not solved this problem, either. However, most volunteer organizations and recreational organizations (especially those involving dangerous activities like climbing, diving, etc) do a far better job of solving it than Wikipedia has (and indeed, than WMF has).
I wish I could frame this post.
QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Thu 3rd February 2011, 1:42pm)
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Thu 3rd February 2011, 12:01pm)
The biggest friction in any organization is the basic friction between people who have the assigned authority to tell others what to do, and those people who SHOULD have it, by way of competence and experience.
I know someone (working for a large US corporation) whose job largely consists of, whenever there is a problem to be fixed, finding out who is responsible for getting it fixed, finding out who can actually fix it, and
making sure that they don't talk to one another, so that the problem will actually get fixed in a timely manner.
Is that a local policy at your acquaintance's office? Or is it a corporate policy at all locations?