Perspective

I'm reading (among other things) David Plouffe's The Audacity to Win, in which he recounts in gory detail the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. It's the sort of book that a political insider would consider riveting, thanks to its attention to detail and potentially-critical insight into a highly successful campaign. For me, though, I'd say it's a fairly interesting read but not nearly as compelling as some other non-fiction books I've read recently.

However, I just encountered a sentence that reminded me of the kinds of situations I used to be in the middle of at work all the time. The contexts are different, but the description he provides applies equally to both. Here's the quote:

"The lead-up to missing an event was treated like a ten-alarm fire; afterward there would hardly be a puff of smoke."

In our case, the "event" was usually a deadline of some sort, ranging from the trivial (say, a request for data from some executive somewhere) to the significant (the completion of a project). Except that all were treated as the proverbial "ten-alarm fire" that Plouffe so ably references. Plans would be changed, weekends would be canceled, and fighter jets would be scrambled... only to discover, once we proved incapable of pulling it all off, that it didn't really matter all that much anyway. Arbitrary brain farts at a high level were regarded as royal decrees by middle management and resulted in huge upheavals for the lowest rungs of the ladder, all the while amounting to "hardly a puff of smoke" when they couldn't be done.

It's funny how many people in a hierarchical structure find it difficult to maintain a proper perspective when it comes to "word from above." You'd think that a democratic society like ours would've lost that knee jerk reaction by now, but I saw proof to the contrary all too often to believe any such thing.