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.
Month: June 2007
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.
On Transatlantic Myths
Link via Atlantic Review:
William Drozdiak writes in his article ‘4 Myths About America-Bashing in Europe’ among other things:
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Europe supposedly lost its relevance. Not true. In fact, Europe and the United States still act as the twin turbines of the global economy, accounting for 60 percent of all trade and investment flows.
Americans invested five times as much money in Germany last year as they did in China, and U.S. firms in total have poured four times as much money into tiny Belgium as they have into India. Europe provides three-quarters of all foreign investment in the United States, creating millions of American jobs.
Thanks to Gateway Pundit
- Update: Today, Gateway Pundit‘s concludes descriptions of various participants, heroics of Iraq’s Mithul al-Alusi and Garri Kasparov with the understated: “Certainly, Prague is not short on heroes this week.”
Countering the posts we’ve been doing on Cuba and Venezuela, across the ocean Sharansky, Havel & Aznar organized “Democracy and Security: Core Values and Sound Policies.” (In Prague, June 5-6, hosted by Prague Security Studies Institute, Jerusalem-Based Shalem Center’s Adelson Institute For Strategic Studies and Madrid’s Foundation for Social Analysis and Studies.) Gateway Pundit is covering it and includes a moving speech by Lieberman and a rather rousing one by Bush – described by Gateway Pundit as “Bush Rocks the Czernin Palace”. The conference is full of people who have taken great risks and lost much for the cause of democracy and liberty.
This doesn’t seem to be getting the coverage one would think it should. For instance, dissidents from seventeen countries sat in the front rows for Bush’s speech – these people are, by their presence, interesting. The stories need not really say that Bush met with them privately or that he got a standing ovation – we understand why that is not news.