Making It Happen. Kyle Mackenzie

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СКАЧАТЬ smugness transformed into minor depression and I felt a little better. When I told her Ralph had assigned Al Burton to the team, Amanda was not impressed. “Al is going to be a major burden. He does everything by the book. And half the time he has the wrong book!”

      I wished that everyone else’s opinion of Al was not quite as dismal as mine.

      “When are you getting started?” Amanda asked.

      I looked at my watch. “I want to schedule the first team meeting for tomorrow morning at 10. Want to come along?”

      “I wouldn’t miss it,” she said, although I got the feeling she was only interested in the entertainment the meeting would surely provide. I would definitely have to find a lot of work for her to do.

      What is the Problem?

      “Why, that’s wonderful, Will!” Jenny told me. She obviously wasn’t getting the message.

      I tried telling her again. “But my future is riding on this project! And so is Stu’s. Remember him? He’s my boss. You like him!”

      Jenny is my wife. She’s a great person, and I value her opinion above just about anyone else’s. But she is not terribly sympathetic. She has crazy ideas about dealing with problems in a rational way. Tonight, for example. The whole drive home (which, admittedly, is only about ten minutes since I live on the outskirts of Darfield, the next town over from Enderby) I had been looking forward to complaining about my troubles and then listening to her appropriately sympathetic noises. As usual, she was not playing her part.

      “Look, hon,” she continued, “from everything you’ve told me, it seems like Stu made a great decision buying the rights to this product. It should be a great success!”

      My wife’s positive attitude is something I have always admired. She needs it in her job. Jenny is a freelance journalist. When we had Sarah, our first child, six years ago, Jenny and I decided to move out of the big city (then Baltimore) and live the small town life. We thought it would be better for the kids, and for us. By the time we had our son Jake three years later, I had managed to find the job with Hyler.

      Moving to the country sounds like a really trendy thing to do, but we’ve never regretted it. Unfortunately, Jenny’s career was harder hit than mine. Before the kids and the move, she had stories published in Newsweek and Time. Now, she writes mostly for local papers and magazines.

      Anyway, as a writer, Jenny has seen a lot of rejections, often for arbitrary reasons. She has this disgusting habit of shrugging them off and trying again.

      I tried once more to convince her it was hopeless. “But, Jen, I don’t know anything about construction or installing machinery. And worst of all, I don’t know anything about projects!” I could almost feel my lower lip trembling. But my behavior was not inducing the least bit of sympathy.

      “Will, it seems to me that you’ll be able to get people on your team who have expertise in specific areas. Is that right?”

      “I suppose,” I admitted grudgingly.

      “So your main problem is that you don’t know anything about projects.”

      I hated it when Jenny reduced my nice, big, insurmountable problems to simple, solvable, problems. “It’s not that I don’t know anything about projects, Jen,” I began. “It’s just that they always become too big and complicated to handle. It’s almost as if the outcome is randomly determined by the Project God, and He is a close relative of Thor.”

      “Do you honestly believe that a project can’t go well?” she asked me.

      “I suppose not.” I said. “I just haven’t run into anyone who knows how to do it.” I paused. “Lots of people claim to know. But most of their ideas don’t hold up when I try to apply them.”

      Half a dozen books about projects had made their way across my bedside reading table in the last few years. I had been to three seminars on the topic. All in vain. Sure, I got ideas, but they did not take into account individuals who were disorganized, people who did not want to spend time doing mathematical analysis, or project managers who did not trust their team. Plus, they were always very construction oriented. And most projects I had worked on had a big administrative component that directly affected everything else.

      Ironically, while I was able to criticize other people’s approaches, I had never figured out an alternative. Whenever I had finished a project, it was time to get on with some other work, or a new project. There was never any time to sit down and learn something from what we had just done. So of course we always did the next project the same way.

      “…should go and see Martha.” Jenny interrupted my thoughts.

      “Sorry, hon, what was that?” I asked.

      “I said, if you want to figure out how to do projects better, you should go and see Martha.”

      I looked at my wife for signs of mental distress. “Martha, your grandmother?” They say that if you want to know what someone will be like in 30 years, just look at his or her parents. I have often wondered if looking at the person’s grandparents gives you a picture of what they will be like in 60 years. This always gives me a fright when I think about Jenny’s grandmother.

      To be fair, the old woman was not that bad. It’s just that Martha (as everyone, including her own daughter, calls her) was perhaps the weirdest senior citizen I had ever met. Somewhere in her eighties, she lived with her daughter (Jenny’s mother) in Darfield. She apparently spent her time sitting on the porch in her rocking chair, smoking her pipe (yes, a pipe), thinking, and being crusty to people like me. Admittedly, she did have a mind like a steel trap, but she made people uncomfortable (at least people like me), pointing out how someone was doing something wrong, or how they could do it better. The most annoying thing about Martha was that she was almost always right. If she told you there was a better way of doing something, there was. But she would tell you in a way such that you did not want to give her the satisfaction of showing her she was right.

      “What does Martha know about projects?” I asked Jenny.

      “What do you know about Martha?”

      “She’s your grandmother, and I often hope your mother was adopted. Other than that, not much. Why?”

      Jenny gave me an exasperated look. “If you don’t know anything about her, how can you be so sure she can’t help you?” There was that logic again.

      “I don’t approach drunks on the street asking for help on projects, do I?” I asked rhetorically. “And I don’t know anything about them either. C’mon, Jenny, you have to give me a reason to go subject myself to her.” I liked the way that sounded. You didn’t go visit Martha, you subjected yourself to her.

      “To be honest, Will, I don’t know that much about her background. I do know that when I was a little kid and Martha was living with us, she used to travel all around the country, and even overseas. She would always tell me she was ‘helping set people’s thinking straight,’ as she put it. According to Mom, Martha and my grandfather started a manufacturing business together before the Second World War. They did very well with it, even better after Pearl Harbor. When my grandfather was killed in London in 1942, Martha ran the whole thing herself. I guess she sold out sometime before I was born and came to live with my Mom.”

      It made sense. Martha seemed like someone who was used to ordering people around. “That’s fascinating family СКАЧАТЬ