It is really amazing that even after the YOG is over and out, new screw-ups continue to surface on the newspapers. My foreign friends could not understand how can a country which is so well-known for its efficiency and effectiveness and most importantly, productivity, gets so screwed-up in such a large scale international event. But we the locals? Oh, we knew there'll be some cock ups here and there for sure, even before the game started. Why? Because it is run by the statboards.
In a typical statboard, decisions are made and orders are given top-down, and what's left for the last in the food-chain will just be actions. This should work well if the orders are precise and logical, but unfortunately there are always smart alecks somewhere in the middle to mess things up.
It's kinda like, the guy at the top envisioned a cup of espresso, then somewhere along the way, one guy in the middle management thinks some hazelnut syrup will add some flavor, then another guy likes some cocoa powder, another guy adds some rum, another guy adds in some milk, and by the time the order reaches the ground, 10 kinds of syrup and 20 kinds of topping have been added to it. To make matter worse, now this last guy on the ground has to brew and deliver this cup of messed-up coffee ASAP/EOD/NOW!
So there you have, prisoner food and food poisoning for the volunteers, sold-out empty stadiums, wrong spelling on souvenir pins, bogus signatures on certificates, F1 tickets sent to volunteers one day after the race... all simple jobs but all went wrong. Heads are definitely going to roll (or have rolled by now), but whose?
The caterers shouldn't have provided the prisoner food and attempted to poison the volunteers, but did someone paid them too little for the catering? And did someone tell them to deliver the food earlier, so early that they turned back under the hot sun?
The printer shouldn't have printed the sample signatures on the certificates, but did someone review the certificates before accepting the print-outs? Did someone tell someone to use sample signatures when designing the certificates and then someone forgot to tell someone that those signatures are bogus?
Dispatch shouldn't send out the F1 tickets so yesterday, but exactly when did someone tell them to purchase and send out the tickets?
My friend is always complaining about how his boss, a top scholar who dived right into the statboard right after she graduated, is always making over-optimistic and unrealistic decisions that have to be corrected by her team who have actually done real work before entering the statboard. But because she is the boss, she has the right to refuse to listen to her team. And when that happens? My friend said,"Oh, then we just do whatever she said lor, and then when it cocks up and people ask, we just say she said one lor!".
And that, is the answer to why there are so many cock ups in the YOG.
3 comments:
the top ppl will say: the plannings are good. it is the execution that screw things up.
then the bottom ppl will say: dunno leh. bosses never tell me to check and double check.
Maybe if the YOG committee had watched the film 'Just Follow Law' by Jack Neo, they may have learned a thing or so from the film and avoided making some of the blunders that should not have been made.
To say it all, there was an obvious lack of check and balances in everything that they do. If they had, our Govt would not be so easily swindled by its own officers for over 2 years.
It just make one wonder whether our GIC/Temasek Holdings are also falling victims to such scams ? They say that the higher up one goes, the easier it is to con them.
the higher the ivory tower is built, the less clear the top floor people can see what the ground floor people want, and the less clear the ground floor people can see how the top floor people are spending the money...
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