As a party chief, I had management problems that the B-School never dreamed of. In the Northwest Territories I hired roustabout labor by going down to the RCMP post and bailing guys out of jail. That’s because the roustabouts were drunk twenty minutes after hitting town for their week off, broke forty minutes later, and in a fight an hour later. There was a beer hall attached to the Hay River Hotel lounge. It was a huge, barn-like room with furniture meant to last, as in three-inch oak legs on chairs, because the customers tended to use the furniture to beat each other senseless. If you’ve seen Western movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s, there was always a huge barroom brawl scene. The beer hall looked like that any time of day or night. You opened the door, and you were physically assaulted by the noise. The place was always jammed and there was always a fight somewhere.
Running field crews in the bush was fairly straightforward. There were only three rules: No guns; no booze; and no broads. (The party chief would sometimes have a rifle when there were belligerent critters in the neighborhood.) In fact, when working 12 hours a day on snowshoes, seven days a week, everyone was too tired to get into trouble, so it wasn’t a big problem. However, when we got into town for the week off, I headed for the lounge while the crew headed for the beer hall.
When I became Operations Manager for Geoscience, Inc. we had a problem with a crew in British Columbia. The client made some allegations about the crew and I went up to take a look. The second day there one of the crew suddenly runs off into the woods screaming. It took half a day to find him an bring him back, blubbering. It turns out some of the crew were dropping acid at night, and this was just a spontaneous bad trip. The real problem, though, was that the Party Chief was young and was too buddy-buddy with the crew. He never should have allowed it to get that far. Besides the three rules above, there is a fourth rule for working under hardship conditions: the Party Chief needs to remain aloof from the crew. So the Party Chief and I went into town and had a few beers while I explained the facts of field crew life to him. He fired a couple of guys and the crew had no more problems. I defy you to find a case study at the Sloan School (MIT’s B-School) that deals with that kind of problem.