Comments on: NASA reorganizes its manned space bureaucracy

By: Col Beausabre

Col Beausabre — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 18:21:29 +0000

Tom, Wouldn’t that be pila….The pilum was the Roman javelin. Each man carried two, one light, one heavy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilum

By: Edward

Edward — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 03:37:17 +0000

Done right, a reorganization breaks up emerging internal empires and removes deadwood. Since three or more people were in charge of this reorganization. over time, it is hard to say whether it was done right.

By: Tom Billings

Tom Billings — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 23:59:18 +0000

Stephen, … and Petronius, are correct. When training for something which they really want to get right, which is hard, needing high productivity, whether it is in widgets produced, or in Pilums hitting their targets, people tend to form into teams. That’s good, and a reflection of the old “party/gang “social structure humans evolved in for 2 million years.

The problem, as far as bureaucracies are concerned, is that teams that gel together also have a habit of, more often than individuals, telling their bureaucracy heads, “No!” When the layers of bureaucracy extend all the way up into Congress, which too often cares more about where the money goes than about how effectively it produces anything, the intermediaries will find themselves shuffling assignments and positions just enough to keep the funding flowing down the hierarchy from Congress, while keeping the actual production at least acceptable. Sometimes they get it right. Too often, they don’t.

By: Stephen Fleming

Stephen Fleming — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 20:10:45 +0000

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.”
— Petronius Arbiter, 58 A.D.