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Originally Posted by Superman
Sure. We can discuss royalty payments later.
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Excellent. Tell you what: I'll give you 50% of my commissions for every copy of the point paper that I sell. That's pretty generous, imho.
Dennis -- the response to bad news depends on the news, but it's consistently more than most normal-sane people would expect. The culture says that if your chain of command comes up with more imaginative ways to respond than you do, then you lose. If you lose too many times, you don't get promoted, get relieved early, etc. Commanding Officers have been relieved from command (e.g. "fired") because the Commodore "lost confidence" in that CO's "ability to command his ship." That's not always caused by a grounding or collision -- a collection of incidents where the Commodore didn't feel that the CO took aggressive enough action will do the trick.
Therefore, responses to Bad News is always as strong as anyone can possibly imagine; they've got to cover themselves.
I've seen a lot of your points in practice, Dennis. The "old farts" were raised in it -- they've been indoctrinated into the culture, which worked fine when they were less senior, so why should it change? And just because Admiral John is doing it one way doesn't mean that Admiral Bill will follow -- Bill and John were rivals back at The Boat School, and so they don't agree with each other on anything. I may be able to convince my Admiral of the need for change, but convincing PAC of the need may be more challenging -- and the failure to convince him may well result in your Point #3, which breaks the whole system.
Wow. Great stuff. If only there was a way to efficiently change the course of a half-million person organization....
Dan