Levels of government

Overview of Piran, Slovenia
Image via Wikipedia

Just now the chief of Slovenian Police (about 10.000 employees according to their website) said that he cannot be held responsible for a thing that a guy 20 levels below him did wrong while talking about Slovenian Interpol not responding to an Austrian Interpol request within a year.

Funny – while working at Parsek I worked on the Cisco Systems Slovenia website. If I recollect correctly our contact at Cisco Slovenia was only about 7 or 8 steps from the CEO of the company which has about 66.000 employees (according to Wikipedia).

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2 Responses to “Levels of government”

  1. gasper_k says:

    Is there a point to this post, except for the level vs. number of employees ratio? :)

    As for responsibility — the top guy is always responsible for what his employees do, and that responsibility should be claimed. Of course he can’t know what everybody else is doing, but that doesn’t mean he has no responsibility for their actions! In more politically decent countries people stand down for smaller mistakes, made deeper down in hierarchy …

  2. The point is that there’s something wrong with the organizational structure of our Police. And the fact that they still have problems shows that this amount of middle management does not help prevent such errors.

    When you have 20 levels it’s easier to say I’m not responsible.

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