It’s a symptom on non-profit leadership generally. They’re an amazing magnet for narcissistic, monomaniacal assholes, easily more so than corporate boardrooms. Probably more pronounced because they tend to be incompetent, and have less money to pad their incompetence with.
Another point of view:
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/v.rhtm/Progress_in_Perspective-755840.html
PROGRESS IN PERSPECTIVE, JAN 25, 2014
The very brief BBC broadcast on the 6 O’Clock News on the 24th January created an impression of disharmony within Bletchley Park.
This is not an accurate impression as the major restoration and redevelopment of Bletchley Park now taking place has been extensively consulted on in the past three years and is very much a team effort.
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Beats me. I done a Google and the British museum uses volunteers as well. Hey, maybe there’s NO good reason why the volunteers couldn’t be used. OTOH an established bunch of volunteers who’ve been volunteering for years are probably a cantankerous bunch of veterans of many years in-fighting, so possibly not the easiest to get along with. What do I know? I was just offering another perspective to the pervasive, indiscriminate hatred for corporations and all the evil they do. Excuse me for sticking up for the big guy.
I mean these plucky over-dogs put food on our tables, light our houses and give us all the wonderful toys we use to avoid nature and for what? Mere money. Yet there’s always some harpy perched afar scrutinising their every move, just waiting for the opportunity to pounce on their slightest major mistake. Pfft.
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My guess, a Cameron crony is in position to receive the contract for the museum. This will mean a steady supply of public cash for whichever connected company is set to reap the dividends from the never-dry spigot. You can’t make money and enrich your pals when it’s all volunteers.
Just as a reminder, tangential to the current case
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It isn’t uncommon for some management types to start their tenure by “firing” everyone nonessential and “rehiring” selectively – make everyone re-apply for the job – and that can include paid employees as well as volunteers.(I’ve seen that happen to friends who are teachers, for example.)
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It is not uncommon to let volunteers go if you really think they’re unneeded.
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It is quite possible, and sometimes absolutely necessary, to “fire” a volunteer who isn’t being productive or who is pulling in a different direction than the organization has decided to go.
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And, yeah, sometimes the new manglement simply doesn’t understand how much of the institution’s knowledge base is between the ears of the volunteers… though arguably that’s a failure of the past manglement, which should have been trying to get them to write it all down for training new staff.
Again, I’m NOT saying any of these apply to this particular case. I’m just saying that the fact that a volunteer has been there for a long time, even if they’re an expert in the topic, is not a guarantee that the volunteer position will continue to exist or that they won’t have to re-justify why they’re the right person to hold it.
Very, uh, insightful. Are sometimes corporate managers also sometimes out of touch with what the public wants and needs?
All of that seems pretty obvious. The point is that they seem to be throwing away valuable resources, appear to be losing their soul, and the CEO’s reaction was pretty bastardly. Whether “these things happen sometimes” is irrelevant to the point, even if they’re happening here (which they seem to be).
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“More accessible and family friendly” sounds as if it could conceal all manner of ills.
Certainly. I’m just pointing out that to counter that, when it happens, it helps to understand their angle on it so you can offer counter-arguments at the same level.
“It’s obvious” … well, it wasn’t obvious to them, so the question is why not. Understanding what the bastards were thinking is first step to changing their thinking… or, sometimes, to discovering that they weren’t the bastards you thought they were. (They may still be some other kind of bastard, of course.)
‘One of the most important members of Bletchley Park was Alan Turing, who died choking on an apple’
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Why is that surprising? We’ve merely adjusted our mental models of reality to incorporate recent data.
These days it seems the most accurate stab in the dark is to assume corruption, collusion, institutionalised malice, etc.
Isn’t this clear to everyone yet?
Why assume that the chain of events was NSA intimidated Intel intimidated Bletchley when the Bletchley organization is being run by the former head of MI6? Isn’t the more obvious chain NSA called the MI6 guy?
Occam’s razor suggests that the NSA would call the MI6 guy, if he needed to be called at all.
Even if he didn’t, we simply don’t yet know enough to do a museum exhibit on Snowden and Snowdonia. I would be happy to do a polemic but it is far too soon to curate an exhibit, the story isn’t hardly started yet.
This has nothing to do with money and everything to do with management and organization. They could have over $100M and do a terrific job, using volunteers like the Computer History Museum does in Mountain View. It’s clear there’s been waffling and wavering on the management of Bletchley for the last 20 years. The Churchill Museum on the site was excellent - many said in its prime with better exhibits than Chartwell - even though the building was shabby. There are ways to run the site that are better than the status quo and I challenge the British government, Friends of Bletchley Park, National Museum of Computing and Bletchley Park board to get their act together.
Disclosure; my husband is on the board of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, where I was also a volunteer. I have visited Bletchley Park and been shown around the site by someone who worked there in the war - she gave me a wonderful visit.
The opinions in this post are my own.
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