“I’d rather go out of business than make my guys draw their own org-charts”

Is the message I’m getting. And don’t get too smug thinking it is a ‘cultural’ thing or applies to my workplace only.

Nor is it geographically specific, if anything, it is a pretty universal phenomenon.

Business owners around the world give this message out daily to hundreds of thousands of mid-level engineers (AND architects, and construction managers, and planners, and...) as they turn a blind eye to this practice of ‘false delegation’.

In the past I used all sorts of more-and-less clever analogies to describe this system of ‘second hand information perusal’, – from needing to be driven by someone else to get anywhere to ...well, can’t quite recall any of the others but am sure they were numerous – I’m known for ample uses of clichés and truisms within my blogs.

When you look at any of these cases individually, they are harmless: An engineer instructs a draftsman to draw up his design, a planner another to create a PP. A mid manager requests hundreds of tender plans printed off, another a range of variations to the org-chart (from the title) to be coloured up in all shades of the rainbow.

Trust me, these are the seeds of a lot-of-trouble, yet to come for your company.

Understand what matters...make the changes necessary...

‘Screw it, let’s do it!’ - to quote Sir R Branson of Virgin fame.