ASSIGNMENT >> 13. Read “Planning and Targets.”

PLANNING AND TARGETS

All manner of plans can be drawn up to accomplish desirable ends. However, they are just plans. Until the when and how they will be done and by whom has been established, scheduled, authorized or agreed upon, they will not be completed. 

This is why planning sometimes gets a bad name. 

You could plan to make a million dollars but if when, how and who were not set in program form as targets of different types, it just wouldn’t happen. A brilliant plan is drawn as to how to convert Boston Harbor into a fuel tanker area. It could be on drawings with everything perfectly placed. One could even have models of it. Ten years go by and it has not been started much less completed. You have seen such plans. World’s fairs are full of them. 

One could also have a plan which was targeted in program form—who, when, how—and if the targets were poor or unreal, it would never be completed. 

One can also have a plan which had no CONDITIONAL TARGET ahead of it and so no one really wanted it and it served no purpose really. It is unlikely it would ever be finished. Such a thing existed in Corfu (an island off Greece). It was a half-completed Greek theater which had just been left that way. No one had asked the inhabitants if they wanted it or if it was needed. So even though very well planned and even partially targeted and half-completed, there it is—half-finished. And has remained that way. 

A plan, by which is meant the drawing or scale modeling of some area, project or thing, is of course a vital necessity in any construction and construction fails without it. It can even be okayed as a plan

But if it was not the result of findings of a conditional target (a survey of what’s needed or feasible), it will be useless or won’t fit in. And if no funds are allocated to it and no one is ordered to do it and if no scheduling of doing it exists, then on each separate count it won’t ever be done. 

Where one has worked out a plan and is devising a program requiring approval, to get them okayed, one would have to show it as: 

a. A result of a conditional target (survey of what’s wanted and needed), 

b. The details of the thing itself, meaning a picture of it or its scope plus the ease or difficulty in doing it and with what persons or materials, 

c. Classification of it as vital or simply useful, 

d. The primary targets of it showing the organization needed to do it, 

e. The operating targets showing its scheduling (even if scheduled not with dates but days or weeks) and dovetailing with other actions, 

f. Its cost and whether or not it will pay for itself or can be afforded or how much money it will make. 

The program would have to include the targets. 

A plan would be the design of the thing itself. 

Thus we see why some things don’t come off at all and why they often don’t get completed even when planned. The plan is not put forward in its target framework and so is unreal or doesn’t get done. 

Sometimes a conditional target fails to ask what obstacles or opposition would be encountered or what skills are available and so can go off the rails in that fashion. 

But if these points are grasped, then one sees the scope of the subject and can become quite brilliant and achieve things hitherto out of reach or never thought of before. 

many different kinds of; all sorts of.

Boston is the capital city of Massachusetts, located on one of the largest natural harbors on the East Coast of the US. The harbor was used heavily for shipbuilding and related activities during World War II. However, the facilities were allowed to deteriorate in the years immediately following the war, with no major renovations until the final decades of the twentieth century.

any of various large public shows at which many different nations display their cultural, industrial, agricultural and scientific products. World’s fairs also present plans for new methods of transportation, architecture, energy systems, etc., through advances in technology.

an open-air structure for viewing plays. Greek theaters were built using the shape of a natural hillside. A seating area of stone benches descended down the hill and at the bottom was a round area where the performance took place.

out of the correct, normal or usual condition; not functioning, working or acting correctly. The phrase alludes to a train that has run off the railway tracks and is literally off its rails.

up to this time; until now.