The omnipotent desk officer


In a highly hierarchical organization there are far too many people raising far too many expectations from the operations people.Thus even the juniormost guy from the support staff of the controller ,who is several notches below the level of the operating manager ,can make the latter’s life miserable by raising utterly flimsy demands.

The desk officer is all-powerful .He can make or mar the careers of the toughest veterans .In a hierarchical setup, the line functionaries, in active operations ,are supposed to interact directly with their controllers for day to day management/business decisions but it is only the organizational charts that say so . In reality the controllers are supposed to be assisted by the ubiquitous desk officers who end up as the main centres of hierarchical power exercising it unobtrusively from behind their humble desks.
The power of the desk officer arises solely out of the authority he derives from the controlling authority and is directly in proportion to the influence he can exercise over the boss , which is significant indeed. The influence arises mainly out of the ease with which he
can confuse everybody , for he alone knows all the rules and is perfectly at home in the labyrinthine framework of office procedures.When the boss himself does little homework the minion’s influence is all the greater. Too often the operations manager somehow manages to
raise hishead above the waters only to find the desk officer shove him down promptly into
the bottom .No matter how much the big boss is convinced about the soundness of a business proposition the desk officer can torpedoe it easily . In fact it so happens that if the businessman approaches the desk officer before he actually approaches the boss the work is usually done . Wise men therefore take cue from this and usually approach the desk officer first for any favour and if the latter is convinced about it he will see to it that the business proposition goes through .

Some times the M.D. or some other bigwig- businessman thinks that the desk officer is too lowly a personage in the scheme of things and pays a very high price for his ignorance . No matter how big you are , you cannot pull your weight to get your work done despite its intrinsic merits unless the desk officer gives his nod to it. The humble desk officer is usually called to participate in any discussions that the businessman has with the Big Boss . While perfect bon homie prevails during the discussions neither the Big Boss nor the businessman has any clue to the workings of the desk officer’s mind. The fortunes of the businessman have already been decided there as several possible objections , many of them difficult to overcome , are thought up and quietly stashed away in the memory to be used when the proposal comes to an advanced stage. There is nothing on the surface of the earth which cannot be stonewalled and all that is required is to think up a few of the old timeworn objections , purely technical , which nobody in the organization has the guts to overrule or waive compliance. The poor boss promises help to the customer who goes back entirely satisfied . It is only after three or four backbreaking trips that the customer realizes that his work is not being done. It is only much later that both the customer and the superior in the organization realize that the humble desk officer is the chief decider and unless he okays the proposition , in principle, there is absolutely no chance of the business proposal getting anywhere.


In matters of administration the desk officer usually plays a neat role , which is not visible to outsiders, in making the entire administrative machinery crystallise to a particular conclusion. This conclusion is usually what he would prefer the administration to come to , eventually. The whole process is so subtle ,much like the ‘market-making’ that an influential stock-broker or an election-eve opinion-maker does . The poor bosses think that it is they who are actually deciding who is going to be the next chairman of a public sector corporation . Little do they realize that the decision has already been taken or they have been led up to it quietly and inescapably and at the time the decision is formally signed and put on paper , no other conclusion would have emerged .The secret is of course the all-too-familiar technique of systematically bombarding the decision-makers with tons of the so-called ‘inside’ information which is a euphemism for hearsay , peerlevel gossip and black lies . In some cases the intelligent desk officer also uses more scientific weapons like carefully structured bits of data isolated from their context , all inescapably leading to the particular decision . He has the data and the bosses do not have it and have to entirely depend upon him to justify their decisions to the rest of the administration and to the posterity.


Coming to the data base who else but the desk officer has it neatly stored on his files and in his memory as well ? The mass of data with him is truly staggering , spread over hundreds of typed papers , each representing a particular development at some point of time in the past or some viewpoint taken by the predecessor managers ,in volumes carefully stacked in the almirahs. In addition there is his elephantine memory which has recorded over the years each and every decision taken at different points of time and the apparent justifications resorted to at that time. The desk officer has the choice to use any of these amorphous data,although many times inconsistent with the decisions sought to be taken ,which can be effectively marshalled as arguments for a particular decision. The boss is relatively helpless because he cannot go into the past except through the selective chronicling of the desk officer. It is said that in a case of the selection of the CEO of a p.s.u. the qualifications for shortlisting the candidates were decided as , among other things , AGE: Not over 55 because there was a particular candidate , a favourite of the desk officer, who was just 54 , 5 out of the remaining 6 eligible candidates being slightly over 56 . In order to keep the last candidate , who is also eligible agewise, out of the selection ,an additional qualification was fixed for the fist time after a gap of twenty years- a qualification that he should have at least a postgraduate management qualification . The qualifications keep changing year after year depending upon who our desk officer pitches for. They say decisions in the government organizations are not taken but merely evolve. A more correct thing to say would be that decisions evolve depending upon who the desk officer at the material point of time is .


A very important source of strength for the desk officer is the lateral linkages he has established with similarly placed desk officers in other departments. There is an unwritten bond of close solidarity among the desk officers which serves , on a different level , to mobilise support for his stand on several official matters . There are unions , although unrecognised , who lend strong support to the desk officer whenever it is felt among the bosses , (which happens sometimes if the boss is a strong-willed person or has been a desk officer himself in his earlier avatar ) that he is overeaching himself . Occasionally there may be a move to demolish his supremacy but soon enough he comes out on top of the situation when the boss is made to realise the futility of such an attempt. The boss has no time to go into the mass of data that is available for decision-making while the desk officer has all the time for it .In the end the boss realizes that he has no choice other than to peacefully coexist with the desk officer and give him his due.





Discretion is not the better part of valour



In modern hierarchical organizations discretion is not the better part of valour. All discretion is frowned upon because the system believes that discretion will be misused . Managers are not encouraged to think independently and use their managerial discretion in their daily decision-making activities. There are several ways in which this operates ,under the surface ,in the life of an organization. Firstly those who do not follow the system although they arrive at the same decision even without following the validation systems prescribed by the organization are seen as mavericks and the entire might of the organization works towards excising these people from the system or at least disempowering them effectively. Secondly the organization makes it very clear to the individual functionary that it is not bursts of genius that are expected of them but only compliance with the existing systems , which have been time-tested and are found to be the main source of organisational strength . If somebody says there is a better way of doing the same thing the organization permits him to write long-winded reports about it or deliver edifying lectures in its training institutions or send staff suggestions for consideration but the basic framework of the rules will not be allowed to be disturbed.Thirdly there is a basic presumption that discretion will always be misused or improperly used . That is why there are rules laid down stating precisely how the discretion is to be used . This contradiction strikes you more when you hear from people in fairly senior positions saying that they are helpless in changing the way the organization is run . If the M.D. confesses that ,left to himself, he would have liked the organization to run differently what would one make out of it , except that the staticity of the system encompasses all including those who are in a position to change it for the better.

We have made managers out of desk officers . The upshot of it is that decisions are taken on the basis of structured support systems taking away the element of discretion from the individual manager .We do not leave the individual manager to decide the adequacy of the data required for taking a particular decision. We prescribe everything that is required as a support system for day to day decisions . We believe that our managers are not competent to decide without elaborate data support systems . Our managers are not required to take operational decisions correctly using their best descretion but show to the organization that they have followed all the rules contained in the Manual before decisions are taken. It does not matter if the decision turns out to be wrong if only it was preceded by compliance with all that is prescribed in the Manual !


The assumption that everything needs to be prescribed in the conduct of the business has an implicit premise that the manager is good enough to hold that position but is not good enough to exercise his brains independently to decide what is good for the organization. A contradiction indeed because if he is good enough to hold that position it is because the organization considers him fit to decide what is good for the organization. Or the organization cannot trust him with enough honesty to use his discretion for the good of the organization. The underlying premise is that there are people among managers who cannot be trusted and hence the water-tight Rules . It leads to the inescapable conclusion that the organisation’s own recruitment and promotion policies are suspect and do not carry any credibility for its own managers as well the public.


The human brain loves formats.There is a format everything .The top management wants to ensure that all decisions by its managers are taken on the basis of carefully structured data compiled in endless formats. These formats are required for the manager to prove the bona fides of his own decisions . The manager has to prove to the organization as well as to the posterity that each one of his decisions has been taken after due consideration of all the aspects as required by the Manual. It does not matter if the formats have themselves become anachronistic and have lost relevance to the type of the business presently being done . What is required is that all the formats have to be duly filled in and all the documentary evidence carefully preserved for the auditors to enable them to check and validate the decision . How often have we come across people who brag about the beauty of some format or other they have designed which is supposed to rationalise the whole reporting system ! Actually whenever anybody says he has redesigned the existing formats the operations people shrink from him in horror because they know that some more new pages have been added to the already bulky format in the name of rationalization. No formats are beautiful including rationalized ones and God knows it is only the operations people who know the pain involved in compiling them.


The Manual is all-important .Organizations are known by the comprehensiveness of the instructions in the Manual and the crisp framework of Rules of conducting business that they prescribe. What pretty fine print ! The customer is always wrong .He should never get what he wants . He can get only what the organization wants to give as prescribed in the Manual . Nothing more . Nothing less. The Manual says “never give anything “ . It only tells you how to get the customer into a corner . The sole purpose of the Manual is to smother individual initiative and throttle sporadic attempts of the mavericks to rise above the system.

Disciplinary action is many times a procedure for determining accountability for wrong decisions , which are retroactively considered wrong not because they were ab initio wrong but because the official concerned had ignored some of the procedures of the Manual. Disciplinary action is often compared to a HOT STOVE which means a deterrent effectively preventing people from violating rules and which comes into action only if somebody touches it (that is only if somebody violates ) . The disciplinary action therefore means determining non-compliances in terms of the Manual notwithstanding the genuineness of the underlying decision . In many cases it would tantamount to determining whether all the formats have been duly filled in at different stages of the decision. The individual manager has no discretion whatsoever to waive any of the numerous data requirements because if he does use his discretion he invites disciplinary action should the decision prove to be wrong later. He cannot enter the plea of budgetory pressures and even if he has achieved 200% of his budgets he cannot obtain reprieve from disciplinary action arising out of noncompliances in terms of the Manual. In fact nobody has ever been penalised for nonachievement of budgets but everybody who has unwittingly got into the web of disciplinary action has landed there because of noncompliances occasioned by overenthusiasm and impatience for procedures . Discretionary powers conferred on the various levels of managers are therefore not to be interpreted as powers for using discretion but as authority for okaying business propositions if they conform to all the Norms prescribed in the Manual. That is why one keeps wondering if all the Rules are followed before the business is clinched where is the need for a Manager ? A junior level auditor should do a really fine job out of it !