Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The new boss arrives. Everyone tells her what they are doing all at once in great detail. The new boss is “sipping from the fire hose.”

I heard this “sipping from the fire hose” phrase a thousand times in my career. The new boss arrives. She is inundated with details during the first few days and weeks. None of it makes any sense. Still, the “information” flushes her brain.

None of the information is summarized. None of the information is organized. None of the information is anything-ized that will have it make sense.

Putting the information into a format that makes sense and is understandable requires work on the part of those who have the information. That is W O R K. And that is part of their jobs. Refusing to package the information into an -izable format is part of their jobs.

Hence, all this “sipping from the fire hose” is a demonstration of those persons simply refusing to do their job. Oh. That’s not good.

Hence, the new boss has learned her first lesson about the persons at work.