and if you're a female, raise your hand if you were born in the south, raise your hand if you were born in the north, raise your hand if you were born outside of the United States. Then this wiseguy co-worker leans over and quietly says: 'Hey, being born in Massachusetts IS considered being born outside of the United States"! That was a swipe at Mass's liberal reputation.- - -
There is one thing that I don't understand about the corporate world. My company will kick off a big initiative. It will be an important, high level project that is frequently talked about by management. But then they ask for 'volunteers' to help with the project! What's with this volunteering approach? If you're sitting around and have time to volunteer for stuff maybe they don't really need you anyway! Let's take the first three people that volunteer and eliminate their positions. See if the company can live without them!
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I think the government needs to adopt one practice from the corporate world. That would be the concept of billing your time. Whenever we get asked by a project to assist with research or do analysis, we usually ask f
or a project number to bill the time to. I think the government should do the same thing. This would have been nice during General Petraeus's testimony before congress. The guy is supposed to come in and report on the situation in Iraq and instead our elected representatives waste at least 100 minutes of his time. He listens to congressman dis the Iraqi government, his microphone doesn't work, and protesters are allowed to disrupt the hearing. All this occurs before he even gets a chance to say his first sentence. Petraeus should have been allowed to bill that wasted time to congress. What a joke.
1 comment:
Sadly, allowing him to bill time to congress would only mean higher taxes for us.
The idea has merit. Perhaps we should pay congressmen only for the time they actually spend legislating as opposed to fund raising and traveling. And filibusters and hot air speeches would not be billable. Only time spent on the true topic should be spent. A PM type approach...a true common agenda for which is stuck to (with a parking lot of items to discuss at later times). Oh, and their raises and bonuses would be tied to their personal performance and the performance of the "company." The same should hold true to the executive branch as well. Of course, this would also mean determining the scope of projects too, with a scope, deliverables and a budget. If the country did this, I think we'd find that most projects such as Social Security and various wars would be out of scope, over budget, etc.
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