In my development of my staff, I, again, relied a great deal on another mentor, Dr. Charles Schroeder from the San Diego Zoo. I became very good friends with Charlie in my early zoo career. And he would often grab me by the shoulder and he would give me some pointers. And he says you always want to maintain contact with your staff. So he developed meetings that he would have every week with the staff, and I again took that over and I used that strategy and I would have a weekly staff meeting, and all my department heads would be in that meeting and have a chance to air their views and I’d want reports from departments. And another thing I developed and I found very useful is that in order to get my curators and veterinarians to make contact with the collection, I had a sheet made up and it was in triplicate and they would have to visit a department, one of them would have to visit a department every day, the keeper would put down the problems, and that was in triplicate, one for the staff person and one for me. So I always knew what was going on around the whole zoo. And if I found too many things on that sheet at the same time, I knew these guys weren’t doing their job.
