Recently found a interesting quote from a book I'm reading.
[quote]The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices ... [that] usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems ... A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors ... [Good administrators] depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they've done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it's too late to make corrections ... One of the hardest things to find is people who actually make decisions.[/quote]
I find the quote somewhat contradictory. According to the quote, a "good" administrator is one that will accept their own mistakes and take responsibility, but [b]will make mistakes[/b].
On the other hand, a "bad" administrator is one that takes time to find a [b]proper and widely supported solution[/b] to a problem, and if they do make a mistake, they are too cowardly and corrupt to acknowledge that they've made a mistake, and puts blame on their reports/others. I feel that the blame is partly justified, as the changes are/were supported by the group that is affected by it.
If you were leading some sort of organization, eg, company, political party, etc, would you rather want an administrator/manager who can "make decisions on the spot", but will make and take responsibility for their errors, or someone who is not so radical, is more popular due to commissions, etc, but to get them to come to a decision, it takes much longer time (and therefor money, effort, etc), and will not take as much personal responsibility if something goes wrong?
On a more practical note, I'm wondering this as I'm part of a game's volunteer balancing team (for a RTS), and the representative of our team is...almost incompetent due to his almost perfect match with the above quote's "bad administrator"; he takes a long time reaching decisions and has lots of threads up discussing everything, and while he does take responsibility on the outcome, I feel that to balance any game, it takes a lot of trial and error, and unless changes are being approved and done fast enough, our team will not meet the dead lines given by the game's developers.
A good administration is one that doesn't fuck shit up or fixes it if they do.
I'd like one who pays me loads and leaves me alone to get on with my job.
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