Quote Originally Posted by pendell View Post
*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.
I'll provide examples by PM of major doctrinal changes successfully pushed through by people in this office. Granted the two examples I have in mind both involve people who managed to stay in that office more than 4 years.

So: No. It's HARD to change an organization, even if you're a lifetime king with unlimited powers in law. Because even if you have the authority to kill any subordinate on a whim, you can still only be in so many places at a time, and you're only as good as the information you receive.
Is it hard? Sure. Is it impossible? No. And your suggestion it's relevant when a "typical maximum time in the job is four years" suggests that such a change is much more likely when the person has lifetime tenure.

Same thing in Gobbotopia -- Xykon is ostensibly the person in charge, but it's redcloak who sets the policies and makes all the decisions. Xykon tried to subvert this using Tsukiko as his agent, and Redcloak killed her because she was going to give Xykon -- the boss of the side -- information that he, redcloak, didn't want her to have.
The prior ruler before Xykon was not Redcloak, but Hinjo. I'd say things changed quite a bit between Hinjo and Xykon.