idw

Really nicely done

I'd like to know how good people think this is from different disciplines

"The low waters of the [Danube] have resulted in several unexpected discoveries. ... And a resident of the northeastern Bulgarian city of Ruse found bones on the Danube river bed, which experts determined were the remains of a mammoth."

The saying goes: it takes ten years to become an overnight success.

As for the stick or twist question, if your only goal is to make money then twisting whenever it seems to make that more likely makes sense. Most people thrive on doing work they care about enough to stick with when it is hard, and my guess is that gets better results over time.

One bit of practical advice: celebrate the little successes on the way to whatever you may think a big success looks like. Wherever the journey ends up, it's important to enjoy it as much as possible.

TL;DR: Bureaucracy in public institutions is not principally a management pathology. It is the cumulative result of a largely logical process. It is generated by policy and rendered permanent by asymmetric incentives. Nobody decides to create it; nobody is readily positioned to undo it.

I assumed this was a new euphemism for layoffs

Done this. Good question but I don't think it's the most helpful way of thinking about it.

Every new recruit brings their own assumptions about how organizations / employment / etc. work and many of those assumptions won't be visible until after a while. This is especially true for managers.

I found Charles Handy's thinking about four types of organisational culture very helpful and I wish I'd found it earlier in the process.

AI summary: Charles Handy identified four types of organizational cultures: Power Culture, where decision-making is centralized among a few; Role Culture, which is based on defined roles and responsibilities; Task Culture, focused on teamwork to achieve specific goals; and Person Culture, where individual interests take precedence over the organization.

Basically, 15>50 is very likely to involve a shift from one of these to another one and making that open and explicit could help you a lot (including understanding how the role of senior managers needs to change).

The book is Understanding Organisations from 1976 but still valuable.

Good luck!

+1 on Mint, specifically with the Cinnamon desktop environment for people leaving Windows