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Good management is hard to find. With a few exceptions the pyramid model is the one taught in business schools and the one that we carry over into government. Maybe some type of top down structure is necessary for both efficiency and effectiveness in some cases, but even then the pyramid should be flatter. Frequently the experts in the windowless little offices who’s conclusions are less about cheer leading and more about nuance, have their opinions watered down, buried in addendums or deleted all together. It is not unusual for the experts to be labeled non-team players or the infamous having a bad attitude because their research didn’t support the boss’s goals. Army Buried Study Faulting Iraq Planning

The study chided President Bush — and by implication Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser when the war was planned — as having failed to resolve differences among rival agencies. “Throughout the planning process, tensions between the Defense Department and the State Department were never mediated by the president or his staff,” it said.

The Defense Department led by Donald H. Rumsfeld was given the lead in overseeing the postwar period in Iraq despite its “lack of capacity for civilian reconstruction planning and execution.”

The State Department led by Colin L. Powell produced a voluminous study on the future of Iraq that identified important issues but was of “uneven quality” and “did not constitute an actionable plan.”

Gen. Tommy R. Franks, whose Central Command oversaw the military operation in Iraq, had a “fundamental misunderstanding” of what the military needed to do to secure postwar Iraq, the study said.

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Tomorrow February 12th is Charles Darwin’s 199th birthday, Cal scientist reflects on Darwin’s genius 

Says Padian in his Nature essay on Darwin’s work, “Today we can identify groups of plants and their insect predators, vertebrates and their parasites, lichens composed of an alga and a fungus, and many other associations that can only be reasonably explained by co-evolution through diversification over millions of years.”

Genes were unknown in Darwin’s time, so the precise genetic details of how plants and animals changed and evolved were still a mystery. But today, the genes that regulate the development of animals and humans have been decoded in detail, Padian noted in an interview, and, remarkably, they turn out to be exactly the same in all organisms.

“Finding the genetic basis of evolutionary development is really amazing,” Padian said, “and it vindicates Darwin’s view of the tree of life completely.”

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