2002-09-13 - 9:39 p.m.
DELEGATION
Treatises on leadership and volumes on management generally urge a leader to delegate. Work, they promise, is much easier when you do not try to do it all yourself. In an ideal world, they would be right. But the world in which I live is not ideal.
The annual girl scout overnight begins tomorrow morning at 9:30 a.m. at a place forty minutes from here. It is 9:25 p.m. local time and I still do not have my groceries. It�s not that I am a last-minute person. I am anything but a last-minute person. The hold up is that I lack a grocery list.
Until I started taking Mrs. Good Cook with me, the girls and I planned the menus. The menus were always simple. While my food is edible, it is not elaborate. I�m an a good-enough cook, not a gourmet chef. The girls may not have waxed poetic but they ate. Since Mrs. Good Cook introduced them to cooking such dishes as Rosemary Chicken with potatoes or pizza handmade the Italian way, our meals require a much more careful shopping list�and Mrs. Good Cook generates it.
Mrs. Good Cook is a lovely person but I do not have the bulk of the grocery list. I tried calling her but she is not home. I do not know when she will be home but the latest I can have that list and shop in advance is 7:00 a.m. tomorrow and I was hoping to sleep in a bit. Mrs. Good Cook was supposed to e-mail me the list by tonight.
I suppose, in a pinch, we are not so far from civilization that I could not send someone into town with a shopping list tomorrow. We have enough adult help that a single adult wouldn�t be missed. It could be done. It may have to be done�but it�s no way to run a railroad or a camping trip. The point is to get away. Then again, perhaps for Mrs. Good Cook, unlike for me, a grocery store IS getting away. There�s no accounting for taste.
Still, the whole experience makes me want to burn all those books and all the good advice from council. Lack of control is more stressful than too much work.
I wonder if I can delegate the sense of responsibility with the job. Now there�s a thought.
___
Addendum to yesterday for those who wondered: Kat did not get a part. No one who had not had parts in at least two plays last year got parts.
LAST YEAR: One Husband
LAST FIVE ENTRIES:
Second String
Infinity
Little Orphans Annie (by Day-Hay)
Here I Am
L�Shana Tova
previous - next
|
Copyright 2006 by Ellen |
