The essential truth of organizations like this, PAMPA for certain, is that they depend on the extraordinary efforts of a few individuals. We tend to lean on them, because they can get stuff done, until they finally get burned out, and then we have to find more of them to do the same.
You would like to think that this effort can be spread out to reduce the load on any one individual, but that generally doesn't work, and the people showing the most aptitude get more and more responsibility, putting the onus back onto the same few people. If those people decide one day to say, "hey, that's not my job" and don't just take care of something someone else missed/skipped, it causes an almost immediate crisis. There have been some notable examples over the years.
I am essentially retired from PAMPA after what I consider a reasonable tenure, and I removed myself from after about 20 years because the executive jobs consist primarily of either cajoling people who work hard to keep doing it, or to continually attempting to find, say, the next Tom Morris or Shareen Fancher. Or, frankly, defending them and the other people like them from attacks (which were *continuous* and *vicious* throughout the time I did it). That went on for years before it became a public topic in 2004, and I assure you, what came out in public was *a tiny fraction*, the mere *tip of the iceberg*, of what was actually going on for many years before that. Now that is mostly over with - I think - but the endless search for the next group of "can do" people certainly continues.
I proved to be pretty good at defending people, but recruiting and glad-handing people into doing what can be very difficult or onerous jobs is definitely not my forte', so PAMPA needed someone else, with a different skill set.
The other half of the problem is that while there are plenty of people who want to get elected to positions in PAMPA, there are not a lot of people who actually want to do anything. There were people who just about disappeared once elected, I never heard from them, they didn't even do their assigned columns, much less get involved with the rather boring matters of deciding what to ask Shareen, or Tom Morris, or Tom McClain, or ... to do. It's not like there are 15 people deciding for a 100-man staff, it's an inverted pyramid, where there are nominally 15 people deciding things in an abstract matter, for 2 people to implement. We have all the trappings of a big business, but outside the 2-3 people, there are nothing but the "trappings".
And at times, these people raised the standards to such high levels that it didn't seem sustainable, and I know that Ted (when president) and me (when VP) had to sometimes try to hold people back in their unbridled enthusiasm.
Even then, with any hard or unpleasant decisions, it was down to a few EC members, and a lot of the others that were supposed to be deciding might just as well have been teleported to Alpha Centauri for all I could tell - presumably because it was a hard decision that they didn't want to deal with. It's a lot easier to just ignore it when it doesn't seem like the fun figurehead job you expected.
This the reality. The people running PAMPA are precious and hard to find, and the entire enterprise depends on keeping the people currently doing all the work on the (unpaid and frequently abusive) job, or finding new extraordinary people to replace them. Part of the important work of PAMPA going forward is to keep the scope of the work bounded, to relieve the pressure on finding or cultivating people who are capable and willing to do it.
Brett
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