Since I am about to write stuff about how lame I believe many organizations and agencies are regarding administration manipulations, I must provide disclosure. I have been a member of two ad hoc government-appointed focus groups. I received a per diem for four days of work plus travel expenses. I was so naive about government forms, I submitted only half of my travel expenses. I was stupid, I thought the government just paid mileage one-way. One group was doing research for the agricultural department and the other was for a SIAST curriculum program.
So knowing that, I want you to understand that I have probably attended far too many administrative meetings where public money items were discussed and allocated. After a few decades of being an observer yet a non-participant in the actual decision-making, I have arrived at a few conclusions.
Big, publicly-funded boards are generally inefficient by definition. When you're running on someone else's money, you get sloppy even though you don't think you are.
To make up for the inefficiencies, you will conduct an annual, if not semi-annual retreat to rethink your strategy so that you can comply with the ever-changing regulations put forth by other, bigger, publicly-funded administrations who are sloppier than you. You look good in comparison.
To ensure inefficient efficiencies, you will form leadership groups that will be required to conduct best practices business development plans.
That, naturally, will lead you to strategic development sessions that will have cropped up during your leadership group conference(s).
Your retreat items will be deployed during the strategic development meetings, if someone remembered to bring their laptop along to record the brilliant ideas that erupted. If not, never mind, there will be another one next year. Recording secretaries are sooo passé these days. Everyone records everyone else all the time anyway. So you'll just require four or five round-table discussions and one think-tank experience to bring all that brilliance to the forefront once more.
Of course after this is complete, within a two-month deadline, it will be revised before it can be submitted for possible implementation.
Once the revision is completed (by someone else, you're too busy), it will require an update.
The update will automatically trigger a vision and/or mission statement (I call them slogans) that will become your business plan mantra forever, or until the next one is refined, defined, discussed rejected and then accepted by a hired business consultant who will charge you the minimum of $68 per hour to ensure that you are proceeding on target and using your budget wisely.
The next step is a trip to the systems team (read computer people) who have been monitoring whatever anyone else was doing on the same file. That will lead to more discussion, rejections, rewrites and reflux regurgitations.
The file will be turned over to support services who will provide innovation techniques that they will have developed with the assistance of paid consultants who have plied the circuit for generations and are currently selling their snake oil at $72 per hour while ensuring you receive results.
The beautiful day arrives, 11 months past original deadline and you announce the implementation of whatever it was you were supposed to do. The panting public will applaud as you cut a ribbon, scoop dirt, drive a front-end loader somewhere or hang up a sign saying you're the best at what you do. And somebody will have to remind you what that might be.
That's kinda why I like to avoid being appointed to publicly funded boards. But my offer to serve as lieutenant-governor, governor-general or king, still stands.
