Eleven Rules for All Bureaucrats
by jhwygirl
Gifford Pinchot was the first chief of the United State Forest Service. While the below rules were brought forward during his time of teaching at the Yale School of Forestry (from 1920 to 1920), there is a world of truth to them even today.
They illustrate, to me, one of the basic causes of mistrust with government, and today’s chaos and partisanship. It isn’t disagreement with policies or philosophies – it is the failure to tell the truth that leads to an inherent mistrust which is much harder to get back than it is to keep.
In other words, once the damage to trust has been done, it’s a really steep hill to climb back up and re-establish.
Elected officials, too, would do well to take notice. Sometimes, theirs is the hard decision to make, but way too many people have Drive FastTakeChances’ opinion of how government works – in this case, local government. DriveFast’s opinion isn’t rare – I suggest that locally it is all too common – and, frankly, there is a whole hell of a lot of truth to it.
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Like all good rule makers, Pinchot violated at least one his maxims – number 7 – and he paid the price. Perhaps that is why it appears on this list – a lesson learned.
Pinchot’s 11 Maxims for Foresters:
1. A public official is there to serve the public and not run them.2. Public support of acts affecting public rights, is absolutely required.
3. It is more trouble to consult the public than to ignore them, but that is what you are hired for.
4. Find out in advance what the public will stand for. If it is right and they won’t stand for it, postpone action and educate them.
5. Use the press first, last, and all the time if you want to reach the public.
6. Get rid of attitude of personal arrogance or pride of attainment or superior knowledge.
7. Don’t try any sly or foxy politics. A forester is not a politician.
8. Learn tact simply by being absolutely honest and sincere, and by learning to recognize the point of view of the other man and meet him with arguments he will understand.
9. Don’t be afraid to give credit to someone else even when it belongs to you. This is the mark of a weak man, but is the hardest lesson to learn. Encourage others to do things. You may accomplish many things through others that you can’t get done on your single initiative.
10. Don’t be a knocker. Use persuasion rather than force, when possible. [There are] plenty of knockers to be had. Your job is to promote unity.
11. Don’t make enemies unnecessarily and for trivial reasons. If you are any good you will make plenty of them on matters of straight honesty and public policy and will need all the support you can get.
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Pingback on Jun 1st, 2008 at 10:15 am
[...] blackbirds offers Eleven Rules for All Bureaucrats. Gifford Pinchot, a pioneering bureaucrat as the first chief of the United State Forest Service, [...]
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Pingback on Aug 21st, 2008 at 8:57 pm
[...] on to this one for a little while. I remember discussing it in graduate school, and I found it on a blog a few months ago. Guilford Pinchot, who served as the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, [...]
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Pingback on Oct 17th, 2010 at 3:44 pm
[...] on to this one for a little while. I remember discussing it in graduate school, and I found it on a blog a few months ago. Guilford Pinchot, who served as the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, [...]
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May 27, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Not bad rules for long term success.
Politics is a game for someone who can suffer fools gladly, which is really the point of most of those rules. Somebody who can listen to a person tell them the public policy equivalent of why American Idol is the pinnacle of Western Civilization, and respond with a proposal to put together a task force to study the issue.
Personally, I admire straight talk and people who will make decisions over those who bullshit me and sidestep the issue with process.
May 27, 2008 at 7:17 pm
It seems to me that bureaucracies are set up to avoid accountability. Governments and elected officials use them to deflect what is almost always true – that decisions are “orchestrated” via special committee or deep bureaucracies that serve only to remove actions via responsibility far from the decision makers.
You don’t meet many straight-talking bureaucrats. They’ll get the ax faster than people will realize they were speaking the truth.
Criminy – I know plenty of bureaucrats that mask reality from elected officials. Is it because they know the electeds don’t want to know the truth? Or because its better that the electeds don’t know the truth? So that one thing can be said by the electeds when the reality isn’t known?
Sure makes things sound better.
Where’s the untruth? It’s all circular.
May 27, 2008 at 8:33 pm
“Administrative rules” done without reference to the elected lawmakers seems to be common at state and local levels. They are really policy decisions made by bureaucrats–bureaucrats taking a stand, making a decision. We wouldn’t want them deferring every thing to electeds. But they engender some resentment from all concerned…yet I think they are a “necessary good”.
I missed one other observation on “the rules”. That is, we do not live in a democracy, but a representative democracy. I always think of it this way. We elect, say, a representative. He or she heads off to Philadelphia on horseback, it takes a week to get there. The voters, the public is left far behind. The representative is elected, trusted, to make decisions in the absence of the “public”, not to make decisions with elaborate dog and pony shows that are described earlier, and to not make decisions with charettes and town hall meetings, but make decisions for those who elected them, representing them but perhaps even making decisions that the general electorate may not understand or appreciate. It’s my clear preference for legislature, not ballot, lawmaking. It’s the process that gave us the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
My philosophy runs quite counter to the populism or the deferred decision making expressed in those rules you cited, or in the populism we see common in “peoples’ actions” where the representative body is overwhelmed with a noisy minority who organizes and shows up. Finger in the wind decision making is an anathema to my model.
May 27, 2008 at 8:51 pm
It seems to me that bureaucrats go to great lengths to enact policies that remove responsibility for bad governing. Zero tolerance removes common sense in our schools, “We had to suspend the first grader who gave a kiss to his classmate, we have a zero tolerance sexual harrasment policy.”
Mandatory sentencing guidelines give Judges an excuse for poor job performance, “I knew he was defending his family but we have a mandatory sentencing policy.”
Our country has run away from personel responsibility and noone is better at it than Politicians. So we have to ask ourselves when did we collectively abandon common sense. We constantly elect politicians who tell us what we want to hear instead of the ones who tell the truth.Jwygirl is right about the ones who tell the truth.We just got no place for them. A man who tells the truth can’t be manipulated We wander why they continue to hide behind vague half truths and answer questions with ten minutes of mishmash nonsense. The answer is because it works. If you tell the truth regarding controversial issues you are guaranteed to make half the people mad, so what we end with is tap dancers who probably can’t remember what they really believe anymore.I don’t think it’s a new thing, politicians have been slicker than deer guts on door knob since the begining of our country. It’s just getting harder to nail’em down. Think and Vote hard Montana