Features
Regardless of the degree of control or results achieved, and regardless of how the hierarchy is justified and rationalized, certain aspects of a command hierarchy tend to be similar:
- rank - especially military rank - "who outranks whom" in the power structure
- strict accountability - those who issue orders are responsible for the consequences, not those who carry them out
- strict feedback rules - complaints go up the hierarchy to those with power to deal with them, not down to those who do not have that power
- detailed rules for decision making - what criteria apply and when
- standardized language and terminology
- some ethics and key beliefs in common, usually enforced as early as recruiting and screening of recruits
Read more about this topic: Chain Of Command
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)