Bad management

Having to deal with recent monumentally stupid management decisions in the organisation where I used to work and, until a few months ago, at which I used to volunteer, made me think about some of the stupidity I encountered from management in the past. One of these happened nearly three decades ago. Because of my particular palaeontological expertise, I was asked to be involved in a project with the Northern Territory Geological Survey (NTGS). They were about to begin remapping several 1:250,000 geological map sheets in the Georgina Basin. This basin is enormous and is about 330,000 sq km in size, about the size of modern Germany.

The NTGS staff assigned to the task needed a bit of a ‘Cook’s tour’ of the basin to get a feel for the rock units they would encounter in the remapping, and as the basin extends into western Queensland, a tour of the basin was organised with the Queensland Geological Survey which covered bits of the basin on both sides of the Northern Territory/Queensland border. After the ‘Cook’s tour’, the NTGS staff members and I went back to Alice Springs, where I, with one of them, sampled about 18 drill cores which had been taken from assorted parts of the Northern Territory portion of the Georgina Basin.

After a few days of sampling cores, I received a phone call from my immediate superior in Canberra stating that I should drop everything, abandon the project and come back to Canberra. I stated that this project had been approved and that the NTGS were depending on my input into their project. I told him I would not leave; so I continued the sampling until it was finished. He was miffed but could do little in the face of my refusal.

After the sampling was complete, the samples were packed in labelled bags, with details replicated on slips of paper inserted into the bags, and were loaded into several 20 litre sample drums and shipped back to Canberra. I flew back to Canberra the next day. Upon arrival back at work, I made an appointment to see the division chief (my immediate superior’s superior) and asked him what the problem was. He was nonplussed and simply said that such a joint project with the state/territory geological surveys “was just the sort of project we should be doing”. After I left his office, I just rolled my eyes in disbelief.

The reasoning behind my immediate superior’s behaviour, I can only guess at. However, given that subsequent acts by him suggested that he was a workplace psychopath, I can only presume his actions were somehow designed to prevent me accruing any kudos from the project.