This is the time of year for many of you to prepare your budgets. It's your opportunity to submit your requests for all the things that you believe your community needs. It's also probably time to stop moaning about our lack of ability to build the public works improvements we all need. Some of us actually know how to get it done so let's start sharing what it takes. Some of us don't know how to get it done so let's not spend too much time listening to them. That takes care of both ends of the distribution curve that describes the number of public works professionals who are successful at getting their projects built. The middle of the distribution curve is filled with people who know how to get it done some of the time.
It doesn't do any good to cry about how engineers and builders held more sway in the old days and men like Robert Moses were able to build massive public works projects that changed the face of their region. Those stories were told and retold because they were news but all across America in those days there were other public works officials who couldn't get their projects built and others who were successful some of the time. In other words there was a distribution curve of success then just as there is today. What's changed is that we have much more real-time information about what's going on then we did when folks were building railroads to tie continents together. What the successful people knew then is the same thing that successful people today know about getting things built.
They know that you have to be prepared to work at getting your project built for a long time and that you have to be stronger willed than your opposition. You have to be able to enlist support for your project from the technical people who will help you build it. You have to be able to create a vision and describe it well enough for your followers to know what the finished product looks like. You have to be a leader. You have to be politically savvy. You have to know who the ultimate approval authority is and what it takes to make them comfortable saying yes. You have to know how to make the opposition irrelevant or how to sneak up on them so that you've gotten all your approvals lined up before they realize how far you've gone. You have to know when the ultimate approving authority isn't going to say yes so that you can find their weakness and replace them with yourself or your puppet.
If all this sounds manipulative and Machiavellian, you're right. I don't write this stuff to help you sleep at night. I'm hoping to challenge you to think about what it takes to get things done and ask yourself if you have the stomach for the job. Think about it. If you can read the second to previous paragraph and not have ethical questions about what it says, you're well on your way to megalomania. If you cringe when you read it, you're well on your way to mediocrity or worse. If you think there might be some good points in there if only they could be tempered with a more democratic and less dictatorial approach, you might want to read my August Monthly Monologue at my web site: http://home.pacifier.com/~ostrowj/ That's where I tone it down a little now that I've got your attention.