difficulties supervising an older employee

Do other people have struggles supervising their elders? I realize that this is tied into my personality, but I am having trouble with confidence in supervising an employee older than me. Last August we (boss and I) asked said person - I'll dub Jack - to write a project report - a simple report with small dataset I thought would be a good to start for this PhD to get more involved in helping us crank out reports. Nothing happened - Jack has low self confidence in analyzing and writing. In Sept. I cranked out the stats so Jack only had to write. Nothing. Boss and I should have acted last year. I just sent an email to boss and Jack suggesting that Jack doesn't work on anything else for the rest of the month - just work on the report. And now Jack is scrambling around looking for literature asking me and boss questions.

Jack frustrates me. but more frustrating is my lack of confidence in saying get this done! As of last year it should have been done and I should have cracked the whip. 10 yrs ago I had trouble transitioning to being the supervisor of students I had been a fellow student with. So I suppose this is another round of growing pains.

Appendicitis in New Guinea?

I just received my Kansas Alumni magazine and the feature academic article is about 2 scientists working in New Guinea. They are ornithologists, one of whom just defended (Edwin, listed as PhD 07, but now at the American Museum in NYC) and the other of whom is obviously still a graduate student but has been traveling to New Guinea studying birds since 2001 (Brett). Fair enough. One was helicoptered out of the field in New Guinea in 2002 for emergency appendicitis in what reads like a very risky move. So, this is what I find weird: I have no idea who these men are. The only name I recognize is one of their wives (Kim) and she was already gone from KU by 2002. Why have I never heard of these people? I know it's a large department, but really, I usually at least recognize the names of the students who overlapped with me entirely. And being air-lifted from New Guinea? Surely that's discussed with legendary field stories or department policies on international work or something. So, am I losing my memory or are there stealth ornithologists that none of us know?