Originally Posted by
pendell
*Cough Cough*
Erm, no.
And that's all I'm going to say on a board that on a board that disallows real-world politics.
Well, okay, one point which I should make: When your typical maximum time in the job is four years, you're not going to do much good or much ill. It's the assistant secretaries and the undersecretaries and the principal deputy undersecretaries -- the non-political career lifers -- who make things happen or not. But the guy up top? Personal experience here: When the guy up top is only there for four or so years, the best thing for you to do with ANY idea of his/hers is just hold your breath and carry on as you always have. Because whatever initiative gets started will just barely get off the ground before someone else gets in and it all goes in the rubbish bin to make room for the new guy's ideas. Thing about people at that level : They want to burnish their resumes same as anyone else. Which means they'll make change just for the sake of change so they can say they did something.
Which means that many of the predecessors ideas will go straight to the bin than for no other reason than they WERE the predecessor's ideas. After all, there's a pretty good chance that you not only want to burnish your own credentials, you also want to discredit pretty much everything your predecessor did in the bargain.
Then you move on and someone else does the same to your legacy.