Was the commander ever informed of his misjudgement and if so what was
his reply? Stories like this make me interested in knowing more.
Thomas A. Lifvendahl, Ed.D.
Curriculum Director
Cardinal Stritch College
Business and Management Division
6801 N. Yates Road
Milwaukee, WI 53217-3985
1/800/347-8822 ext. 543
tlifven@acs.stritch.edu
On Wed, 5 Feb 1997, Jack Latimer wrote:
> This reminded of an incident that occurred some years ago. I work
> at a large Navy facility. People who work there are dedicated to their
> jobs and work hard, many of them putting in extra hours with no thought of
> asking for extra compensation. They just enjoyed their jobs and gave it
> everything they had. One day the commanding officer of the base, standing
> at his office window observed that many people seemed to be driving home
> shortly after 4:00 PM (our normal hours were 7:30 AM to 4:30 PM). He came
> to the conclusion that people were leaving early, and issued a
> proclamation that everyone was expected to be working from 7:30 to 4:30
> and those who left early were stealing from the government - those may not
> have been the exact words, but that was the sense of it. I had one person
> who regularly came to work at 6:00 AM and left at 4:30 AM, claiming no
> extra hours. After hearing the proclamation, he never reported to work
> before 7:30 AM for the rest of his career. There were many others that
> reacted similarly. The sad part was that many people at the facility
> worked from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM and most were driving home legitimately.
>
> The interesting twist and, the relation to this thread of this
> story, is that here we had many people freely giving of their own time
> because they loved their jobs and what they were contributing to the
> country, and because of a commander who failed to check his facts and shot
> from the lips, he, in fact, was responsible for the Navy losing many
> freely given extra hours from people who enjoyed the gift they were
> giving.
--"Thomas A. Lifvendahl" <tlifven@acs.stritch.edu>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>