Wisdom In The Workplace

In Corporate America, projects are becoming a staple of most employees' daily responsibilities. A problem that frequently results when 1) upper management doesn't drive a realistic strategy and prioritization of projects or 2) project managers are immature in their understanding of the business they work in, is that grand plans are made without consideration of the company's ability to achieve them. At my troubled formed employer, many people would say resources (human and budget) were the biggest constraint in achieving goals. I would say culture was. Teamwork wasn't just not encouraged, it was outright prevented.

In one conversation, someone captured the essence of the issue in one statement which I subsequently printed out and hung on my wall. Months later, a visitor from our corporate office read it and gave a one sentence response that summarized the rest of the problem. Here are both of those statements:

"You can't execute ideology."
"But you can execute dogma."