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A Waiheke Island Myth Part 1 On Waiheke Island, New Zealand, a myth has grown up among a handful of people in the Rocky Bay Village th...

Monday 3 February 2020

MANAGERS AND MANGLERS

People are not managers just because they have 'Manager' on their office doors and business-cards. A true manager is someone who knows how to manage. And why.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (sixth century BC) put it well:

'A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honour people, they fail to honour you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, “We did this ourselves.” '

The worst managers are despised because they mangle, not manage; they are incapable of managing. They are blind to the truth of the situation, they are vain about their views of it, and they are determined to impose their false notions on everyone under them (and those under them heartily wish they were not).

The primary Mangler for the bus service on Waiheke Island, as this blog has pointed out over and over again, is the worse-than-incompetent entity Auckland Transport--the networks division, led by that self-declared 'expert' Colin Homan, who has yet to manifest any expertise on Waiheke.

Compounding the situation, as was mentioned in an early posting on the Waiheke bus shemozzle, is the new head of the Waiheke Bus Company, who is another mangler.

He and Auckland Transport, for example, have waxed lyrical about preventing fatigue amongst their drivers. Which sounds good and laudable; it sounds caring; it sounds safety-conscious. Until you see what they have done.

Waiheke drivers have been banned from working more than forty hours in a week, so their hours and their income have been significantly hit. They were happy to work ten hours in a day, but they were not happy when their hours were cut from fifty-five to forty, because that chopped $200 net out of their week's wage. Nor are they happy when they are rostered to a shift that stops at 22:00 one day then starts the next day at 07:00. That gives them a mere nine hours, minus travelling-time, between shifts--imposed by a mangler who then pretends to care about fatigue and is applauded by worse-than-incompetent AT. Manglers of feather feed on the same carcasses of vanity.

Over on the mainland drivers may work fifty-plus hours, so they can earn far more by staying there and not spending time coming over to work on Waiheke. Then the manglers at AT bleat about the driver-shortage on the island, the shortage created by their manglement. But they cannot see that through the fog of their vanity, stupidity and worse-than-incompetence.