The blog's not about this

I saw this post on one of my forums. This one is actually a Yahoo Board where about 200 of my USAF colleagues from Berlin gather - although many of us have moved to the more dynamic Facebook by now. Although I never worked with him, "Jeff" posted some management philosophy, saying that these are things he learned from his experience as an Air Force linguist...

I'd say this is pretty similar to how I've come to think about things, as a consultant in my case. Maybe there was something to the responsibility they gave us back then - I supervised 25 people when I was 23, for example. We never faced hostile fire in the environment I worked in, of course, but we did handle a pretty high profile assignment there during the Cold War. Here's Jeff's list of management tips:

"-What looks like mindless chaos is often entrepreneurial magic waiting to happen.
-Sometimes, the most helpful things managers can do are -- crosswords.
-Generally, the only true limitations organizations have are the ones imposed on them by management.
-Any participative management approach with great potential, when imposed on an organization from above, will turn into a mindless ritual of filling out forms to prove everyone is participating.
-The greatest minds often aspire to nothing more than doing the thing they find most intellectually stimulating.
-People who work for you, if given the simple right to screw up multiple times, will do their best never to do so even once.
-If you give people the right to screw up, they'll do their best to see that no one notices when you do.
-When you're most in a hurry, having the patience to wait for your people to come up with the right answer will save you untold embarrassment when your own inherently inane solution crashes and burns.
-When you find yourself statistically proving that morale is high instead of checking to see if people have smiles on their faces, disaster is right around the corner.
-If your operation is going down the toilet, sometimes the guy who cleans the bathroom is the best source of how to stop it and turn things around.
-Doing things right often looks sloppy, messy, and completely disorganized."