Thursday, September 13, 2012

Systematic Futility...

Picture this, a business unit is under new managment. (Internal Promotion), the new manager is reviewing the abysmal performance of one of the sections.  They decide to ask only the other senior people that they know, rather than any of the coal face people doing the work.

Since they have only recently been promoted and have up till now had regular lunch dates with these people... why are they expecting to suddenly gain new insight... by talking to the same people they have always talked to and continuing to ignore the same people who have the information.

Did I mention there is a culture of old sexist male academics involved?  Talk about endless fucking pointlessness.  This is the same business unit that has been dysfunctionally unable to get anything done right for the past few years.  Now that the VC's mate has finally been given the arse, he has been replaced with another specimin of dead wood from the same bad forest. 

This is the same business unit that last year conducted a survey about their performance... and then supressed the results. 

This is the same business unit that was audited by an external auditor and then ignored the vast majority of the report.

Its sad when the senior managment starts to look like a retirement home for aged and failed academics who are so out of touch with everything they just act as a retardant on the efficiency of the system.  Suppressing change, unable to foster communication, engaged in work avoidance behaviour and generally sucking up money and exhaling nothing but stale air.

I must congratulate the VC on his moves to flatten the system and remove a lot of the dead wood that was sitting around sucking up free lunches... but there are still holdout sections of the Uni that need a bright light shone up their dark recesses and a bit of objective rot removal.
My suspicion is that the VC is moving only when his hand is forced, since I suspect that he finds some use for these types.  Someone has to go and talk to the state and fed polies and suck up the external audits and various other bodies that the Uni has to interact with. But that does not make them functional parts of the system when they are at home. 

Still the VC has managed to fire the completely insane one, although it was his personal hire... so its right that he pulled the plug.

That's an anecdote that needs some telling. 

Hire a person ( who has history with at least one senior staff member. Bad history BTW ) who then proceeds to rapidly, stuningly and completely irritate, offend and flumox with her obvious stupidity a large number of the acadmic staff in the University.  Demonstrates a complete inability to manage a team, stay focused on anything, play the long game or anything involving budget constratings.  Speaks in a constant train of through fashion.... kinda hopes if she says enough shit, something may sound intelligent.  Has no ability to functionally answer a question.  Lacks the trust or faith of anyone around her and demonstrates incompetence with money, budgets, time and promises of a stunning degree.  Then proceeds to play games with the whole schools planning for the next year by stopping all hiring of casual staff for the next semester (until week three of the semester) blocks all resource allocation for every unit except on her persoanl sayso ( while having no fucking idea what the units are, how they are run, why they are being run..essentially tries to micromanage a system that currently takes about 60 or so administrators) generally tries to pull all authority for anything up to her level and prevents people doing the jobs they were hired to do, and have been doing for quite some time.... does this strike anyone as anything other than a FUCKUP? 

HOW THE FUCK DID THIS PERSON GET HIRED?  VC's personal selection... that's how.

Oh, and then she got a golden payout as she left the building.  Oh, and she had well documented history for doing the same shit in her last position... where she was also shit-canned.  Was any due-dilligence done on this fact? I leave this as an exercise for the reader.... (since I don't actually know)

Wonder what sort of reference she got?

The funniest bit was watching her online profile as she crowed about being hired.. got fired... then stripped all references to the University out of all her profiles. Completely whitewashed it. 

Yet another example of a functining researcher who should not have been asked to manage anything.

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