My DC HCO Office was much enlightened when I told them after a flap that when people question orders coming through HCO people weren’t compelled to think up new and wonderful answers. The job of HCO was to make the original order stick.

In other words if by any line I require somebody to do something in an Org and they come to you and ask for more data on it, you are supposed to say “What did he say?” and then they read it back at you and you are supposed to say “Well that’s what he said, now please do it.” And they say “We can’t do it because yap yap” and you say “Read it again” and they do and eventually they find out what it is they are ordered to do and they only find out THEN that they can do it.

You are there to make Ron’s orders stick. We’ve already proven that when they don’t the whole thing starts to go around the bend because my orders are based on years of know-how and the other fellow’s changes are based on no experience.

So your first action is to know what it is I’m telling people to do and then to make those orders stick, usually by quietly and patiently getting them to understand what they are. The HASI London Arthritic Project is a good case in point. It wasn’t followed very well and now there is traffic on the lines about it and if I didn’t now try to straighten it up believe me it could create thousands of words of traffic because the way it is rigged now it will detract from the income of the whole Org by bad programming (jamming lines), not make income for it, which is a reverse of my intentions.

Each department in a Central Org is rigged like a clock. People who are trying to succumb do it by failing to get the gen and then doing something that louses up the machinery.

Your function is to keep the place going the way it was intended to run and not the way somebody else thinks it ought to. Example: within the past three months HCOs have got Melbourne and Auckland to handle departments exactly the way they were set up to run. They have both experienced higher income lately. The business available was the same. Only the method of handling the line was changed (except that the new Assn Sec Melbourne was willing to run it right over the staffs collective dead body if need be) and it was changed directly back to my policies and suddenly the places boomed.

Get them Hats on people and get the lines running the way they are supposed to and you’ll have high income weeks almost at once.