Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
all its nooks and crannies and battle scars. His is the fourth family to take title in the course
of its 1000-year history, and he's made it his concern that its history continues to live with
him.
Seeing the monuments of past centuries and meeting people who are passionately engaged
with the past has a subtle but irresistible impact. You begin to experience the past as a vital
force rather than as a dull subject in school, and it feels as if another dimension of reality
has revealed itself to you for the first time.
***
About a hundred years ago an American engineer named Henry Gantt developed a work-
flow chart that still bears his name. In a Gantt chart a vertical line represents today; hori-
zontal bars represent tasks that need to be done and show when they should be completed
in relation to today.
The genius of this simple representation is that it allows us to create a model of how the
work should go, and then to measure the amount of variance from the plan as the work
proceeds. Pam and I used to project a Gary Larson cartoon on the screen in our project
managementclassesthatshowedtwoducksfloatingnexttoeachother.Theonethatishalf-
submerged says to the other: “Fred, be honest with me. Do you think I'm sinking?”
Without a project plan, you may work just as hard as the next guy, but you never know if
you are ahead, on schedule, or behind while you're working. Thanks to the simple tools of
project planning, Americans in countless industries across the nation can now know much
sooner that they are falling behind. After all, if you don't know where you are supposed to
be, how can you possibly know how late you are?
All work in American organizational life—business, government and non-profits in-
cluded—is now based on this paradigm. It's taken for granted that this is a good thing inso-
far as it creates accountability and allows for measurement and quantification of progress.
The downside that is missed is the enormous amount of anxiety we've injected into the
workplace by organizing reality in this way.
Do you know where the word “deadline” comes from? It originally referred to a line drawn
in the dirt at a distance of about 15 feet from the perimeter wall of a military stockade. This
created a virtual yard for the prisoners who could leave their cells once a day to stretch and
exercise. If they stepped over the deadline, the guards would shoot them on the spot.
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