Got Time? Make Time.

I irritated my wife, just a bit, this morning, reading excerpts from a Washington Post article on lessons that the Obama Administration can take away from the Bush style, along the lines of 'Things Not To Do'. It wasn't that she disagreed, but she thought that I was saying that Obama would do these same things, and didn't understand why I thought that.

It got me to thinking, just a bit, about the concepts of Best Practices, Mission Statements, and all of that. I don't know what its like for smart people (smarter than me, by far), but in my range, it helps to have a blunt series of guidelines that you can use to periodically check whether you're acting, under stress, duress, the press of time, the press of events, the way that you wanted to work while you were thinking about it, at your ease. Google's 'Don't Be Evil', for example, which is now occasionally mocked as the foolish statement of people made when they had nothing to lose; that's a simple guideline, and though there's also an element of subjective judgement in there (what I think evil, you might not), its an easy analysis. Is a given course of action evil?

I am sure that neither Bush nor anyone in his Administration, even the Machiavellian Mr. Cheney, set out to act in a way that would harm their ability to govern effectively (even though their definition of 'effectively' might be far different from mine). But that's what they did -- internecine feuds, withholding and distortion of information, failure to pass on bad news. It wasn't unique to them -- any organization has this. Hell, my daughter was reluctant to give me bad news, because she knew I'd be mad -- and I can't fire her! But when an organization does this repeatedly, they veer from whatever they wanted to be to something else, usually without realizing it, and sometimes to their detriment.

That's where the concept of Best Practices, Mission Statements, or what have you come to play. Are we acting the way that we want to, a substantial amount of the time? I know its not an easy question, particularly under pressure. But its one that I hope the Obama Administration asks itself, on a frequent basis. Even if -- especially if -- they don't have the time.