Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
I sort of came to understand that what people were saying was that our staff process didn't
work fast enough, and I also sensed that it didn't work fast enough. I can talk about that some
more, if you like.
The way I decided I could help the most is not messing with the process, but be this
substantive person that can make decisions. The problem was, we never got around to
making decisions. So, if Al Genetti, the Chief of Staff, could work the process and I could
deliver somebody a more rapid decision, that's probably helping the organization better than
my trying to also work the process.
So, I came to a different conclusion as to what the real problem was, and I was willing to let
Al Genetti keep working the process.
When we got out of the workshop, with people talking all that morning, all of a sudden I was
supposed to give feedback in the afternoon. I was ready to give feedback by eleven o'clock in
the morning.
So, I sort of summed everything there and told everybody where I was coming out. It
occurred to me, also, that perhaps we had an identity problem within our headquarters unto
ourselves, and that identity problem--having worn two hats before and having sensed this
before in our headquarters--is that we sometimes confuse whether we're doing things as
staff for the Chief of Engineers or the staff for the Commander of USACE. Only one place
does that occur in the Army, and that's with the Chief of Engineers and Commander of
USACE.
By the way, the Army is about to put the Surgeon General back in that forum, where Health
Services Command will go away and the Surgeon General will be the commander of
whatever this new organization is called. So, he'll be two-hatted again.
Because of this, there was confusion in the headquarters--and certainly we had two
letterheads. You can sign things "Chief of Engineers" or you can sign things "Commander,
USACE." A person might be working in the morning on one action, and in the afternoon on
another action for the other side.
I thought, then, for the balance of that day we'd just have an exercise to figure out if people
really knew where they were because I didn't know. You know, you ought to be able to
construct a wiring diagram representing your organization. It always seems like you might be
a little bit better if you knew who you are when you're doing what you are doing.
So, I asked folks to address that issue, and two different work groups came up with a scheme
by which they would lay their functions down and then address whether they were Army
Staff or USACE headquarters staff--that is, policy, programming, or operational in those
aspects of the USACE headquarters. Then the work groups really got into it.
I mean, I watched it, and there was a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and it seemed like a pretty
good exercise, to me. I had some disagreement with one, but I mean, that was part of the
interaction of understanding.
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