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by polemic 4407 days ago
Those answers are great, but they're also very high level and general.

One of the best pieces of advice, badly paraphrased below, I've heard from a military context.

   "Any time you instruct a subordinate, you must be 
    prepared to deliver the same instruction every single
    time they perform that action, and expect it to be 
    performed in that way until otherwise instructed."
This is a warning about micromanagement, flippant decisions and how to delegate. For example, if you tell someone off-hand not to bother you with X, be prepared to never be bothered with X again. If you tell someone how to shine their shoes, be prepared to tell them how to shine their shoes every single day.

Again, this is an a military context where orders flow downhill, but the same applies in other areas of business. An experienced manager knows where they need to set the boundaries within which their staff operate, with as much autonomy and initiative as possible. An inexperienced manager doesn't understand how to balance this equation.

PS if anyone has a better formulation of the above, please share =D

1 comments

I am reading Dune and this is very similar to the advice Leto gave to Paul. Which came first, I wonder?
Can you please quote which part you refer to?
"Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him . . . once . . . long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject."

I pulled it from http://www.bestlibraryspot.com/ScienceFiction/Dune/16669.htm....

On a related note, Herbert's "God Emperor of Dune" is an amazing book. Best in the series, in my opinion.

Pretty much every scene/dialogue in it is a worthwhile quote: on leadership, duty, love, humanity...

Check out some of the quotes here (but go read the book!): http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3634588-god-emperor-of-...

Comes up just before Paul does his sandworm trial.
Having not read Dune myself, I was rather hoping you would quote the relevant passage, so that I and those like myself can compare it to the aforementioned military quote, and perhaps derive some insight from it.
It's worth reading.
I am almost through it and I have to say I am not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I read books like this mostly because of their significance to the SciFi genre and while I think this books has some really great elements, the fact that Paul is basically infallible irks me. Nobody is that perfect in my experience and I wish I wasn't sure that he'd be successful with everything he starts.

I did read a critique of Dune recently that suggested that Herbert initially wanted to show how dangerous superheros are. This explains a bit about why Paul is a superhero: he has to be to make Herbert's thesis. However, then I'd be rooting for him to fail and I don't like the stories where the protagonist is evil in some subtle way and you are supposed to root for them to fail.

You don't know how the GP spends his time. Maybe his day is full of saving people who stepped on landmines in Africa, in which case, it's very much not worth reading.

That answer is a bit useless when someone only asked for the relevant passage.