Michael's Workbench

I believe this needs to be memorized (or at least read) by anyone who ever had to manage people or projects:

If you take a flat map

And move wooden blocks upon it strategically,

The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should.

The science of war is moving live men like blocks.

And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.

But it takes time to mold your men into blocks

And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies

Hamper your wooden squares.  They stick in the brush,

They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries,

And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them.

–A string of blocks curling smoothly around the left

Of another string of blocks and crunching it up–

It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind,

But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow

To move, when they start they take too long on the way–

The General loses his stars and the block-men die

In unstrategic defiance of martial law

Because still used to just being men, not block-parts.

(Stephen Vincent Benét – John Brown’s Body)

h/t Mark Horstman