18 Comments

Sometimes, you've got to pull rank, especially around tough decisions that have a lot of disagreement. With that rank, however, you also have to pull the responsibility and take the ownership that comes with that.

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I think that's the thing: if someone recognizes that great responsibility goes along with that power, that's about all you can really ask for. We ultimately have to have a tiebreaker at some point.

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I feel like marriage is a perpetual pulling of rank and one party bending to the will of the other. Or maybe that's just my marriage. :P

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NO COMMENT!

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I pull rank on my kids all the time. They don't know it or care about it or react to it, but... I'm not sure what my point here was.

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Rank is important in martial arts, and I'm kind of amazed that I somehow skirted past making that connection. My point is similarly nebulous.

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'I'm going to stop you right there.' Evil boss man code for pulling rank

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A close cousin: "I'm going to let you finish."

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That's a kinder gentler boss! Evil reigns supreme in big bizness

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True, but OTOH, it's so passive-aggressive that the person isn't even going to want to finish their thought.

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Preach! One thing I loved about working in tech is how smart boss man's err 'leadership' is. Doesn't make them less evil but you can respect it.

I had one boss who was an absolute psychopath and he'd let me whiteboard a solution and talk it all out and then he'd go, nah we're not going to do that. Here's what we're going to do.

A lot of times the consensus building, etc. activities are just to rally the troops (there is a reason military lingo is so prevalent in big bizness) to execute a predetermined plan.

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It's true, and I didn't really grasp the value of simply congregating with your team on a regular basis. These days, we have a meeting every Friday to see what's going on with the gyms and to assign things that need to be done to various folks. It's a pretty good process, but even if it was nothing but dick and fart jokes, it would be worth doing.

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Dec 31
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"Likewise, if there’s some kind of safety emergency, there can be little room for debate and discourse, especially if a leader sees more than their staff (so often the case)."

Monty Python spoofed this concept in a sketch about a sinking ship, where the sailors dressed up in weird costumes ("It's a sort of idealized version of the complete Renaissance man...") and the captain amended what they were supposed to be to the traditional "women and children first" order so they could get off the ship. (Typically for them, it ended up that they were actually appearing on a low-budget BBC television program not unlike their own.)

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There was just so much meta going on with the Pythons. They were just incredible together.

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