Function of the Executive ------------------------- As nearly everyone knows, an executive has practically nothing to do except to decide what is to be done; to tell somebody to do it; to listen to reasons why it shouldn't be done, why it should be done by somebody else, or why it should be done in a different way; to follow up to see if the thing has been done; to discover that it has not; to inquire why; to listen to excuses from the person who should have done it; to follow it up again to see if the thing has been done; only to discover that it has been done incorrectly; to point out how it should have been done; to conclude that as long as it has to be done, it may as well be left where it is; to wonder if it is not time to get rid of a person who cannot do anything right; to reflect that he probably has a wife and a large family, and that certainly any successor would be just as bad, and maybe worse; to consider how much simpler and better the thing would have been done if one had done it oneself in the first place; to reflect sadly that one could have done it right in twenty minutes, and, as things turned out, one has to spend two days to find out why it has taken three weeks for somebody else to do it wrong.
This message was sent on 1 Jul 1996