a) the home office should have known b) it was surprising that a regional area would make a change in process without HO knowledge
My point is:
a) the Home office of any sizable organization rarely, if ever, has complete knowledge of the operational details of any given business unit b) every organization's outlying (IOW: non-home office) branches makes changes to process without HO knowledge or approval and that those changes are often not based on any actual business need but based on optimizing performance against whatever metrics the business unit is judged against.
The MickyD's example is valid because the mission of an organization is largely irrelevant to generalized organizational behavior and my hypothesis is that the behavior in the SFO TSA office was not mission oriented (as evidenced by the Home Office response) but merely normal organizational behavior.
Our points are different in that your reaction to this seems to be one of surprise and outrage and in my mind this is normal, not terribly surprising organizational behavior.
Oh come on. Surely they have an operational manual?
Not relevant--- using the McDonald's analogy again: McD surely has a manual yet the experience at their stores can widely vary. A manual doesn't assure quality or uniform experience.
When they create policy or decide what needs searching, surely they would communicate this back to head office. If the electronic devices they were looking for were so dangerous, why weren't they notifying the main organization as to their concerns?
Just remember: head office didn't know that they considered these things to be dangerous. Let's say, for a second, that the devices were a danger. Why would only a few local offices checking them and not everyone?
None of that is relevant, since we don't know why the decision was made.
In fact it is likely, approaching probability, that the policy was not instituted to combat a specific security concern but because some area or middle level manager wanted to pump up some metric he's being measured for. Since the sites are routinely tested for their ability to catch test bombs, it's safe to assume that's the metric that was being addressed.
You have to remember that often employees who are begin measured on concrete numbers don't work for quality or for the mission statement---- they work the numbers their boss thinks is important.
What are you talking about? Individual business units and individual employees make decisions at companies constantly that the home office is unaware of. Anyone who is surprised that a specific field office might make a decision without the central office knowing about it is flatly stupid.
Commercial enterprises have tried for decades to give people worldwide consistency in their stores and failed, with a strong profit motive to drive it. McDonalds, long touted as the very model of worldwide consistency in product and experience, can't even achieve this in a single city much of the time. If they can't manage it for something as simple as making burgers and fries, how could the TSA expect to accomplish it.
Centralized control of a diverse organization works to a point but to expect that every action at every location is instantly known and authorized by the home office is flatly stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Your point seemed to be that:
a) the home office should have known
b) it was surprising that a regional area would make a change in process without HO knowledge
My point is:
a) the Home office of any sizable organization rarely, if ever, has complete knowledge of the operational details of any given business unit
b) every organization's outlying (IOW: non-home office) branches makes changes to process without HO knowledge or approval and that those changes are often not based on any actual business need but based on optimizing performance against whatever metrics the business unit is judged against.
The MickyD's example is valid because the mission of an organization is largely irrelevant to generalized organizational behavior and my hypothesis is that the behavior in the SFO TSA office was not mission oriented (as evidenced by the Home Office response) but merely normal organizational behavior.
Our points are different in that your reaction to this seems to be one of surprise and outrage and in my mind this is normal, not terribly surprising organizational behavior.
Oh come on. Surely they have an operational manual?
Not relevant--- using the McDonald's analogy again: McD surely has a manual yet the experience at their stores can widely vary. A manual doesn't assure quality or uniform experience.
When they create policy or decide what needs searching, surely they would communicate this back to head office. If the electronic devices they were looking for were so dangerous, why weren't they notifying the main organization as to their concerns?
Just remember: head office didn't know that they considered these things to be dangerous. Let's say, for a second, that the devices were a danger. Why would only a few local offices checking them and not everyone?
None of that is relevant, since we don't know why the decision was made.
In fact it is likely, approaching probability, that the policy was not instituted to combat a specific security concern but because some area or middle level manager wanted to pump up some metric he's being measured for. Since the sites are routinely tested for their ability to catch test bombs, it's safe to assume that's the metric that was being addressed.
You have to remember that often employees who are begin measured on concrete numbers don't work for quality or for the mission statement---- they work the numbers their boss thinks is important.
What are you talking about? Individual business units and individual employees make decisions at companies constantly that the home office is unaware of. Anyone who is surprised that a specific field office might make a decision without the central office knowing about it is flatly stupid.
Commercial enterprises have tried for decades to give people worldwide consistency in their stores and failed, with a strong profit motive to drive it. McDonalds, long touted as the very model of worldwide consistency in product and experience, can't even achieve this in a single city much of the time. If they can't manage it for something as simple as making burgers and fries, how could the TSA expect to accomplish it.
Centralized control of a diverse organization works to a point but to expect that every action at every location is instantly known and authorized by the home office is flatly stupid.