A commenter on the post immediately preceding this one links to his own thoughtful essay on project management. This kind of thing may be old hat for the PM gurus here but it’s meat to me. You might like the essay if you, like me, are interested in the dynamics of managing big technical projects, and particularly if you are interested in how projects fail.
Human Behavior
The March of Folly
Derek Lowe recently touched on a topic I’ve been noticing for all of my adult life, and for which I’m only starting to develop a general theory. Bureaucratic and governmental solutions tend to work in the near and medium term, but usually degenerate into a mess that is either worse than the original problem, or that ultimately fails to solve the original problem, usually within a decade.
Venezuela Is an Old Story, But Some Have Not Discerned the Plot
In Black Dogs, a novel that describes the tenuous hold Westerners have on civilization and the nearness of our more primal selves, Ian McEwan sets a dramatic scene in Berlin; Berlin, of course, has been a setting for much real and fictional drama in the twentieth century and may in the twenty-first. In While Europe Slept, Bruce Bawer describes his anger at the parade of Che shirts as he sat in a Berlin Starbucks. He describes his reaction:
I should have been inured to Che’s ubiquity by now. But it angered me to see his face in Pariser Platz, where his cause had once won a nightmarish, and seemingly irreversible, victoria. Some would ague that his reduction to an image used to sell leisure wear represented a “commodification” of Communism, and therefore a victory for capitalism. But looking at those shirts, I felt no sense of triumph.(129-30)
Quote of the Day
Why do parlor tricks convince even very intelligent people that they have witnessed a paranormal event rather than a bit of magic? Because even many intelligent people are too foolish to realize that they are not so intelligent as to be beyond being fooled.
Quote of the Day
Whenever I hear it said that people are ceasing to [be] told about something tremendously important at school – like history, classical music, foreign languages, Latin and Greek, ancient history, etc. – I react with the suspicion that, far from this presaging oblivion for this or that discipline or body of knowledge, for something to be ignored at school is a prelude for a significant if not huge revival of popular interest in the thing.