For all of you who have been following this thread, in its various and
never-less-than-intriguing guises, I thought the following excerpt from
this Saturday's "Guardian" (a well-respected UK newspaper, for those of
you living elsewhere) might be of interest. It comes from a review of the
latest Kevin Coster film, "The Postman." The piece quotes Calvet Hahn,
"philatelic auction agent and author of several books on postal history"
as saying:
"William Faulkner was a postal employee in Mississippi. He was fired
because he was incompetent--he was focusing on his writing and not his
postal duties. He was incompetent, from a postal point of view."
I'm assuming that if anyone had an emnployee "ranking" system in those
days (the 1920's?) it would have been the good old USPS. Even if it were
just a "rating" system, let me pose the following questions, which are
essentially mind experiments, as I have absolutely no knowledge of the
situation other than what I've quoted above:
1. Would the USPS have been a better/more successful organisation if it
had managed to intervene in the "Faulkner situation" and find a way to
better bring his considerable talents to bear on their mission, goals and
objectives?
2. Would we now live in a better/more successful society if the "Faulkner
situation" had been worked out and he had found a way to balance a postal
career with his wish to write?
3. Would Faulkner have been happy if there had been intervention, and his
obituary had read "Postmaster General for Mississippi" (or whatever title
he might have been expected to achieve) rather than "Nobel Prize winner"?
4. With the right leadership/mentoring/management, could he have done
both?
I don't know the answers to these questions. I do know we are dealing
with an extreme case here (i.e both the USPS as an employer and WF as an
employee are at the 6-sigma ends of their respective distributions), but
such cases are those which advance understanding, I think.
Cheers
Richard Goodale
--Richard Goodale <fc45@dial.pipex.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>