Contingency Plan Quotes

One thing that makes it possible to be an optimist is if you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose.

Another way to be prepared is to think negatively. Yes, I'm a great optimist. but, when trying to make a decision, I often think of the worst case scenario. I call it 'the eaten by wolves factor.' If I do something, what's the most terrible thing that could happen? Would I be eaten by wolves? One thing that makes it possible to be an optimist, is if you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose. There are a lot of things I don't worry about, because I have a plan in place if they do.

The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse.

And even, if circumstances required, a contingency plan for his contingency plan's contingency plan.

Not having a contingency plan or never performing risk analysis and mitigation activities is like not having an insurance plan for yourself.

You never explained the change of heart." "Maybe I got tired of seeing Kevin bend. Or maybe it was the zombies. A few weeks back you and Renee argued contingency plans for a zombie apocalypse. She said she'd focus on survivors. You said you'd go back for some of us. Five of us. You weren't counting Abby or Coach. Since you trust Renee to handle the rest of the team, I'm guessing the last spot is for Dobson. I didn't say anything then because I knew I'd look out for only me when the world went to hell. I don't want to be that person anymore. I want to go back for you.

Fortifying the company may involve diversifying suppliers and establishing contingency plans to mitigate supply chain disruptions.

Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too try, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical - because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they'd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in.

The brain is an incredible multitasker. At the same time that it’s piercing itself with superheated needles of anguish, it’s ruthlessly making plans, contingencies, plotting out a future, giving zero fucks whether it’ll ever see it. On the day I die, it’ll be calculating what to have for dinner as it bombards itself with pain signals from my amputated legs or my clocked-out heart.

The board should consider different future scenarios, such as economic downturns or technological disruptions, and develop contingency plans to navigate them.

Contingency planning is much more fun than crises mitigation.

Toby wasn’t an idiot.” Jameson’s expression was sharp. “Unless this was some kind of suicide pact, he would have had a contingency plan to make sure that he and his friends weren’t caught in the flames.

We burn through a lot of resources obsessing over possible outcomes and forming contingency plans, but in reality we’re just fueling our anxiety.

The brain is an incredible multitasker. At the same time that it's piercing itself with superheated needles of anguish, it's ruthlessly making plans, contingencies, plotting out a future, giving zero fucks whether it'll ever see it.

And yet, you didn’t bother telling me yourself,” I snapped, still outraged. “I couldn’t! They made me promise not to.” Somehow, his betrayal hurt worse than all the others. I had come to trust him implicitly. How could he do this to me? “No one believed I’d be able to talk the Warriors down, so everyone just made contingency plans without me.” Never mind that I Hadn’t been able to talk them down. “Someone should have told me. You should have told me.” There was legitimate pain and regret in his voice. “I’m telling you, I wanted to. But I was trapped. You of all people should know what it’s like being caught between groups, Sage. Besides, don’t you remember what I said just before you got in the car with Trey?” I did actually. Almost word for word. No matter what happens, I want you to know that I never doubted what you’re going to do. It’s smart, and it’s brave. I slouched further into my seat and felt like I was on the verge of tears. Adrian was right. I did know what it was like to have your loyalty stretched between different groups. I understood the position he’d been in. It was just, some selfish part of me wished that I’d been the one his loyalty has been strongest to.

don’t try to plan for every contingency. Doing so will only overburden you and weigh you down so that you cannot quickly maneuver.

Mercy is a contingency plan, devised by the guilty in the eventuality that they are caught. Justice is the domain of the just. - Richard Rahl

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.

There are times when the marvels of scientific advancement expedite our processes, making our lives easier. Modern technology provides machines that can think three or five or seven steps ahead of the human mind, machines that offer elegant solutions, a selection of contingency plans, Bs and Cs and Ds in case A isn't to your liking. And then there are times when a screwdriver and a bit of elbow grease are all that's necessary to get the job done.

Optimism research teaches us that we should expect the best and have a contingency plan for the worst.

S’mores everywhere were coming up with contingency plans, and the nation of Peeps had declared a state of emergency

No battle plan can anticipate all contingencies. There are always unexpected factors including those stemming from the opponent's initiative. A battle must thus becomes a balance between plan and improvisation, between error and correction. It is a narrow line. But it is a line one's opponent must also walk. For all the balance of experience and cleverness, it is often the warrior who acts quickest who will prevail.

Mark Twain once wrote, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”49 Worry has a way of holding our attention hostage. This is especially true for things we can’t control due to the elevated level of uncertainty. We burn through a lot of resources obsessing over possible outcomes and forming contingency plans, but in reality we’re just fueling our anxiety. Trying to think our way out of situations beyond our control may feel productive, but it’s nothing more than a powerful distraction. Worry baits us with the promise of a solution but usually offers none.

It's didn't take a genis tactician to see that failure was imminent, Alyss more powerful that Arch had supposed. He would have to focus on his contingency plan and let the Glass Eyes attack on Wonderland fizzle out--a circunstance mildly disapointing, but not worrisome. Such a strategist was the king that he had a contingency plan for his contingency plan, and even, if circunstances required, a contingency plan for his contingency plan's contingency plan.

Does it occur to you that if he set his mind to it, Steve could be a truly excellent supervillain?” Clint said into the comm unit, not bothering with any sort of segue. He knew very well who it was. “We have a contingency plan in place for that,” Coulson said without missing a beat. In the background, Steve said, “Wait, what?” “Oh, c'mon.” Stark sounded seriously insulted. “If anyone here is going to go the black leather and weather control ray route, it's gonna be me, let's not even kid ourselves.” “Every active SHIELD employee has a wallet card instructing them what to do in the event you go supervillain, Stark. It's standard equipment.” A beat of silence. “What?” Tony asked. “I got one,” Bruce said. “Want to see it?” “If you show it to him, it'll defeat the purpose of having a plan,” Natasha said. “And I like this plan, it's a good plan, I do not want to go through them trying to come up with something else.” “Yes, I want to see it,” Tony said. “Thor, did you get a card?” “Verily. Their plan is most sound. I believe we will be able to subdue you with great swiftness, before you have much chance to hurt yourself or others. The damage to property will, of course, be massive, but such things are to be expected.” “What the hell? You will not be able to subdue me quickly. Screw you, I am wily and brilliant.” “I didn't get one,” Steve said, and there was a loud sound of no one being surprised. “It's not a good idea to warn the bait that-” Clint started...

It sounded somewhat doom-laden, so I felt obliged to look it up more thoroughly, in case I should eat some chocolate rather quickly.

I'd be a dumbass if I didn't plan for every contingency.

Fear can't be reasoned with. Neither can hate. They're like love. They're almost identical emotions. That's why Ares and Aphrodite like each other. Their twin sons - Fear and Panic - were spawned from both war and love.' 'But I don't...this doesn't make sense.' 'No,' Piper agreed. 'Stop thinking about it. Just feel.' 'I hate that.' 'I know. You can't plan for feelings. Like with Percy, and your future - you can't control every contingency. You have to accept that. Let it scare you. Trust that it'll be okay anyway.

We’ve survived it. It’s a known quantity. I have a binder with nine hundred pages of analysis and contingency plans for conflict with Mars, including fourteen different scenarios about what we do if they develop an unexpected new technology. The binder for what we do if something comes up from Venus? It’s three pages long, and it begins Step One: Find God.” Errinwright

But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.

MADDY’S TRUTHS Make room for who you are by knowing who you’re not. Smile all the time, at everyone, without exception: when you’re happy it will be contagious, and when you’re angry it will drive the person you’re mad at bonkers. Blow-dry before lipstick. Counters before sweeping. Water before dinner. To hell with what everyone thinks about your life, but you should know what you think about it. Don’t stay out past one a.m.—nobody is proud of the stories born later than that. Plans contingent on perfection fail. It’s dangerous to fight who you are. The stupidest thing you can do is believe your own bullshit, but you probably will every once in a while. Flowery perfume smells like a cover-up. Don’t have a room your kids can’t play in or a couch your kids can’t sit on; it’s their house too. If you don’t know what to say, say, “I don’t know what to say.” If you mess up, say, “I messed up.” If you need help, say, “I need help.” Never count on any one thing. Don’t confuse wanting to have sex and rent movies with someone for wanting to marry him. Never buy button-fly jeans—they aren’t flattering on anyone ever.

The best=laid plans, one's most fastidious contingency strategies have revealed themselves in the cold light of day to be laughably inadequate, no match for the happenstance that seems of late only to promise death, mayhem, poverty, flood. And here you are, having spent all that time protecting your home from the oncoming elements only to find that it has been shored up with crackers.

Do you have a zombie contingency plan?

It was always best to have contingency plans, and plans within plans.

you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the MAV blew up. I wouldn’t know what hit me, but if I miss the intercept, I’ll just float around in space until I run out of air. I have a contingency plan for that. I’ll drop the oxygen mixture to zero and breathe pure nitrogen until I suffocate. It wouldn’t feel bad. The lungs don’t have the ability to sense lack of oxygen. I’d just get tired, fall asleep, then die.

Quietly, seriously, Laurent outlined the state of play as he saw it, describing his plans and his contingencies. Damen realised that Laurent was letting him in to a part of himself he had never shared before, and he found himself drawn in to the political complexities, even as the experience felt new, and a little revelatory. Laurent never opened his thoughts like this, but always kept his planning intensely private, making his decisions alone. When

What he would become. But he had a plan, didn't he? Several plans, depending on the contingencies. But each plan had the same ending--it was just a matter of how he got there. He would last for as long as he needed to write what he needed in that journal. Something about that simple, empty little book, waiting to be filled. It had given him a purpose, a spark, a winding course to ensure the last days of his life had reason and meaning. A mark, left on the world. He would write all the sanity he could muster out of his head before it was taken over by its opposite.

The best leaders in any enterprise see problems coming and stack the deck to prevent negative “what ifs” from happening. They also have contingency plans to take advantage of positive openings which occur in fleeting windows of time.

The last five years had been a series of carefully orchestrated events. Every move, every strategy had been poured over in painstaking detail before it was set into motion. Pieces on a chess board. A collision of fate and circumstance. I’d planned for every hitch. Every contingency. Except the one that blindsided me like a vat of acid to the face. I fell in love with her.

The logistics of the operation would have boggled most minds: the American contingent alone called for 6.6 million sets of rations, five thousand crated airplanes, five thousand carrier pigeons and accompanying pigeoneers, and a somewhat unambitious 144,000 condoms, fewer than two each.

Also, the technologically high-risk Apollo aerospace programme is considered a classic success story of megaproject planning and implementation. The cost overrun on this US$21 billion project was only 5 per cent. Few know, however, that the original budget estimate included US$8 billion of contingencies.18 By allowing for risk with foresight, the programme avoided ending up in the type of large cost overrun that destabilises many major projects during implementation. The Apollo approach, with its realistic view of risks, costs and contingencies, should be adopted in more major projects.

Although routinely criticized, a pessimist attitude enables a person never to be disappointed with the vagrancies of life or frustrated by the outcome of any event. A pessimist prepares for reality by considering every possible contingency. Having reckoned with the worst possible circumstances, and game planned what to do in the event of the most drastic outcome, a pessimist is pleasantly surprised when they achieve a better than expected result.

And yet sometimes she worried about what those musty old books were doing to her. Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical--because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they'd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in.

All were expecting to die, and every day of their life was a day of suffering and torment. All had witnessed terrible crimes, and the Germans would have spared none of them; the gas chambers awaited them. Most, in fact, were sent to the gas chambers after only a few days of work, and were replaced by people from new contingents. Only a few dozen people lived for weeks and months, rather than for days and hours; these were skilled workers, carpenters and stonemasons, and the bakers, tailors and barbers who ministered to the Germans' everyday needs. These people created an Organizing Committee for an uprising. It was of course, only the already-condemned, only people possessed by an all-consuming hatred and a fierce thirst for revenge, who could have conceived such an insane plan. They did not want to escape until they had destroyed Treblinka. And they destroyed it.

You look hot with one of my favorite books in your hands. Book nerds are sexy.

I hold her tighter to me, sending a wish into the universe that I can actually keep her.

If you fall in love with your best friend, do me a favor and marry him, because a love like that will give you something to smile about, even on your last days.

if we incentivize conformance, people will insert contingency reserves to prevent their tasks from missing the schedule. The more granular the schedule, the larger the schedule reserves. And these reserves aggregate into even longer timelines. The more we increase planning detail and the harder we try to incentivize performance, the worse our problem becomes.

Without intuitive and instinctual knowledge, animals and human beings could not endure. All animals possess the basic instinct for survival, and their instinctual behavior exhibits many traits of advance planning. All animals prepare for future contingencies such as changing seasons and the birth of their young. They also know when they are ill and make advance arrangements for their demise. Human survival frequently calls for us to be true to our animal instincts. Organized impulses rule all animals including human beings because they ensure self-preservation and continuation of the species.

PEACETIME CEO/WARTIME CEO Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive. Peacetime CEO builds scalable, high-volume recruiting machines. Wartime CEO does that, but also builds HR organizations that can execute layoffs. Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture. Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. Peacetime CEO knows what to do with a big advantage. Wartime CEO is paranoid. Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully. Peacetime CEO thinks of the competition as other ships in a big ocean that may never engage. Wartime CEO thinks the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children. Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market. Peacetime CEO strives to tolerate deviations from the plan when coupled with effort and creativity. Wartime CEO is completely intolerant. Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone. Peacetime CEO works to minimize conflict. Wartime CEO heightens the contradictions. Peacetime CEO strives for broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements. Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy, audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime CEO trains her employees to ensure satisfaction and career development. Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their asses shot off in the battle. Peacetime CEO has rules like “We’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number one or two.” Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number one or two and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule.

Let’s see, you will need a project plan, resource allocation, a timeline, test cycles, a budget, a contingency budget, lots of diagrams, flowcharts, a media release, a strategic vision, a charter, technical specifications, business rules, travel expenses, a development environment, deployment instructions, a user acceptance test, stationary, overtime schedule, a mock-up, prototypes…” “Tell me,” she said, “did the people who built the pyramids have any of those?” “Mostly, they had beer. Come to think of it, if there had been such a thing as a Business Analyst in ancient Egypt, then the hieroglyph for it would have been very graphical, if you know what I mean.

There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously.

He spent the next two days in careful, decisive preparation efficiently conducted around his day job. The three imperatives of his mission were embedded in every action he performed: (1) keep it simple; (2) provide for every contingency; and (3) never panic no matter how much your plan goes awry, which it occasionally did. However, if there were a fourth rule, it would have to be: exploit the fact that most people are fools when it comes to things that actually matter, like their own survival. He had never suffered from that shortcoming.

After you resolve to confess, know that it’s not your job to figure out all the possibilities, plan for every contingency, and worry about all the potential responses. Your job is simply to be faithful and do the next right thing. Confess with a willingness to accept consequences and work toward long-term restoration.

He remembered those countless nights staring at the irrevocable concrete and wishing he might will himself beyond the dungeon. Yet, the evocative beseeching for God never reached beyond the guard towers. Mechanistic accretions that eroded in the ether and died shortly after the moment of conception. This world incubated and full of things that you have no control over. Windless air in the tomb that perpetually stank of a milieu of filthy men and toxic bleach. That was now gone. Finally, Ronnie had what he prayed for those many nights. A plan that was based off more than the basic human contingencies. A reason to live that was outside of himself.

Always remember this: whenever you have thought long and hard about a new idea or plan of action, working out lots of details and preparing for all sorts of contingencies, and you first tell someone else about it, they are hearing it for the first time. It will be nearly impossible for any newly informed person to be as enthusiastic or as confident as you are. And it’s natural for your own confidence level, like water running downhill, to settle at the lowest point nearby. That’s why it is so important to be very careful about how you share your plans with others, and limit your exposure to the negative thinking and negative comments casual disbelievers can produce.

It’s a key responsibility of the leader, in any field of endeavor (athletic team, military, or business) to assure the successful continuity or ability of his organization to carry on should he die or become incapacitated. It’s his duty to plan for such a contingency out of loyalty to his people and, if in a business endeavor, loyalty to his customers and, clients.

Dr. E. Stanley Jones explains, “In prayer you align yourselves to the purpose and power of God and He is able to do things through you that He couldn’t do otherwise. For this is an open universe, where some things are left open, contingent upon our doing them. If we do not do them, they will never be done. For God has left certain things open to prayer—things which will never be done except as we pray.”4

I would read the Scriptures longingly, trying to imagine how wonderful it would be not to worry about anything, safe and secure in the presence of Jesus all the time. Miracles would be normal. Love would be natural. We could always give and never lose. We could be lied to, cheated and stolen from, and yet we would always come out ahead. We would never have to take advantage of anyone or have any motive but to bless other people. Rather than always making contingency plans in case Jesus didn’t do anything, we could count on Him continually. We, our lives and all that we preach and provide would not be for sale, but would be given freely, just as we have received freely. Our hearts would be carefree in the love of our Father in heaven, who always knows what we need, and we could get on with the glorious business of seeking first His Kingdom and His righteousness. There would always be enough!

Most decisions, and nearly all human interaction, can be incorporated into a contingencies model. For example, a President may start a war, a man may sell his business, or divorce his wife. Such an action will produce a reaction; the number of reactions is infinite but the number of probable reactions is manageably small. Before making a decision, an individual can predict various reactions, and he can assess his original, or primary-mode, decision more effectively. But there is also a category which cannot be analyzed by contingencies. This category involves events and situations which are absolutely unpredictable, not merely disasters of all sorts, but those also including rare moments of discovery and insight, such as those which produced the laser, or penicillin. Because these moments are unpredictable, they cannot be planned for in any logical manner. The mathematics are wholly unsatisfactory. We may only take comfort in the fact that such situations, for ill or for good, are exceedingly rare.

Jill’s words reminded me of a concept I learned in the Army: the 80 percent solution. As Army leaders, we were trained to recognize that the 100 percent solution—absolute perfection—isn’t realistic, so the 80 percent solution was our goal: Get most things right, and get your butt moving to accomplish the mission. If you have 80 percent handled and a well-trained team, you’ll be able to deal with whatever contingencies arise. But if you spend all your time planning to create the 100 percent perfect solution, the troops won’t have time to prepare, train, and actually execute the mission.

Sure, zombies can “be a metaphor.” They can represent the oppressed, as in Land of the Dead, or humanity’s feral nature, as in 28 Days. Or racial politics or fear of contagion or even the consumer unconscious (Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead). We could play this game all night. But really, zombies are not “supposed to be metaphors.” They’re supposed to be friggin’ zombies. They follow the Zombie Rules: they rise from death to eat the flesh of the living, they shuffle in slow pursuit (or should, anyway), and most important, they multiply exponentially. They bring civilization down, taking all but the most resourceful, lucky and well-armed among us, whom they save for last. They make us the hunted; all of us. That’s the stuff zombies are supposed to do. Yes, they make excellent symbols, and metaphors, and have kick-ass mythopoeic resonance to boot. But their main job is to follow genre conventions, to play with and expand the Zombie Rules, to make us begin to see the world as a place colored by our own zombie contingency plans. […] Stories are the original virtual reality device; their internal rules spread out into reality around us like a bite-transmitted virus, slowly but inexorably consuming its flesh. They don’t just stand around “being metaphors” whose sole purpose is to represent things in the real world; they eat the real world.

The night before, Michael Chertoff, President Bush’s secretary of homeland security, had called to inform us of credible intelligence indicating that four Somali nationals were thought to be planning a terrorist attack at the inauguration ceremony. As a result, the already massive security force around the National Mall would be beefed up. The suspects—young men who were believed to be coming over the border from Canada—were still at large. There was no question that we’d go ahead with the next day’s events, but to be safe, we ran through various contingencies with Chertoff and his team, then assigned Axe to draft evacuation instructions that I’d give the crowd if an attack took place while I was onstage.

However, there is now a sizable body of experimental work documenting flexible learning capabilities in insects that, in some cases, rival those found in mammals and birds. These cognitive abilities range from conditional discrimination and concept formation to spatial cognition, planning, causal reasoning, and social learning. Indeed, a review of the insect cognition literature leaves one with the impression that bees are likely to outperform birds and mammals on many quintessential cognitive tasks, such as matching-to-sample discriminations and the cross-modal transfer of learned concepts - often necessitating fewer trails for success than is necessary to train up similar abilities in mammals (including primates!).

Combat, like anything in life, has inherent layers of complexities. Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success. When plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them. And when things go wrong, and they inevitably do go wrong, complexity compounds issues that can spiral out of control into total disaster. Plans and orders must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear, and concise. Everyone that is part of the mission must know and understand his or her role in the mission and what to do in the event of likely contingencies. As a leader, it doesn’t matter how well you feel you have presented the information or communicated an order, plan, tactic, or strategy. If your team doesn’t get it, you have not kept things simple and you have failed. You must brief to ensure the lowest common denominator on the team understands.

During mission planning, we had intelligence concerning dogs that might impede our goal and were part of the target’s contingencies. The exact method used to neutralize aggressive dogs in the field is classified information. However, Special Ops has some really incredible dogs. In fact, during the raid to kill Osama bin Laden, the highly trained men of SEAL Team Six had with them a uniquely trained dog as part of the mission. SEAL canines are not your standard bomb-sniffing dogs. The dog on the bin Laden mission was specially trained to jump from planes and rappel from helicopters while attached to its handler. The dog wore ballistic body armor, had a head-mounted infrared (night-vision) camera, and wore earpieces to take commands from the handler. The dog also had reinforced teeth, capped with titanium. I would not want to try the techniques this book recommends on this dog. Thank God he’s on our side.

The brutality of the regime knows no bounds. It does not remain neutral towards the people here; it creates beasts in its own image out of ordinary people who might have been neighbors instead. Even more dangerous was the fact that the fundamentals of humanity and the ABCs of life have been eviscerated from the hearts of many people here. State television destroys human compassion, the sort of fundamental empathy that is not contingent upon a political or even a cultural orientation, and through which one human being can relate to another. The al-Dunya channel stirs up hatred, broadcasts fake news and maligns any opposing viewpoint. I wasn't the only one subjected to internet attacks by the security services and the Ba'thists, even if the campaign against me may be fiercer because I come from the Alawite community and have a lot of family connections to them -- because I am a woman and it's supposedly easier to break me with rumors and character assassinations and insults. Some of my actress friends who expressed sympathy for the children of Dar'a and called for an end to the siege of the city were subjected to a campaign of character assassinations and called traitors, then forced to appear on state television in order to clarify their position. Friends who expressed sympathy for the families of the martyrs would get insulted, they would be called traitors and accused of being foreign spies. People became afraid to show even a little bit of sympathy for one another, going against the basic facts of life, the slightest element of what could be called the laws of human nature -- that is, if we indeed agree that sympathy is part of human nature in the first place. Moral and metaphorical murder is being carried out as part of a foolproof plan, idiotic but targeted, stupid yet leaving a mark on people's souls.

The activity of a commander-in-chief does not at all resemble the activity we imagine to ourselves when we sit at ease in our studies examining some campaign on the map, with a certain number of troops on this and that side in a certain known locality, and begin our plans from some given moment. A commander-in-chief is never dealing with the beginning of any event—the position from which we always contemplate it. The commander-in-chief is always in the midst of a series of shifting events and so he never can at any moment consider the whole import of an event that is occurring. Moment by moment the event is imperceptibly shaping itself, and at every moment of this continuous, uninterrupted shaping of events the commander-in-chief is in the midst of a most complex play of intrigues, worries, contingencies, authorities, projects, counsels, threats, and deceptions and is continually obliged to reply to innumerable questions addressed to him, which constantly conflict with one another.

Women's magazines sadly remark that children can have a disruptive effect on the conjugal relationship, that the young wife's involvement with her children and her exhaustion can interfere with her husband's claims on her. What a notion- a family that is threatened by its children! Contraception has increased the egotism of the couple: planned children have a pattern to fit into; at least unplanned children had some of the advantages of contingency. First and foremost they were whether their parents liked it or not. In the limited nuclear family the parents are the principals and children are theirs to manipulate in a newly purposive way. The generation gap is being intensified in these families where children must not inconvenience their parents, where they are disposed of in special living quarters at special times of day, their own rooms and so forth. Anything less than this is squalor. Mother must not have more children than she can control: control means full attention for much of the day, then isolation.

The 'five variations' are the following: A road, although it may be the shortest, is not to be followed if one knows it is dangerous and there is the contingency of ambush. An army, although it may be attacked, is not to be attacked if it is in desperate circumstances and there is the possibility that the enemy will fight to the death. A city, although isolated and susceptible to attack, is not to be attacked if there is the probability that it is well stocked with provisions, defended by crack troops under command of a wise general, that its ministers are loyal and their plans unfathomable. Ground, although it may be contested, is not to be fought for if one knows that after getting it, it will be difficult to defend, or that he gains no advantage by obtaining it, but will probably be counter-attacked and suffer casualties. The orders of a sovereign, although they should be followed, are not to be followed if the general knows they contain the danger of harmful superintendence of affairs from the capital. These five contingencies must be managed as they arise and as circumstances dictate at the time, for they cannot be settled beforehand.

A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide for unforeseen contingencies, the production of shoddy goods to fulfill planning targets expressed in crude quantitative terms, the accumulation of unused money by a public reluctant to buy substandard products, with resultant inflation and a flourishing black market.

Non-Tenure Writing Jobs The MLA session on the adjunct crisis indicates where higher education has come to in the Brave New World of the 21st century. Research by the MLA itself, by Gloria McMillan, by Eileen Schell and other colleagues, already confirm the deep replacement of tenure-track faculty with contingent adjuncts and others. This crisis is deepest in composition and in community colleges. Doug Hesse’s program at Denver Univ. is no solution; it will extend the subordination of composition through sub-faculty lines while rationalizing it as “good for students"(before research has even proved it so). But, sub-faculty writing lecturers will never be treated as “real” professors by their institutions and will never be accepted as colleagues by their tenure-track peers. Such sub-faculty plans will weaken the faculty as a whole in the academy by further dividing it into competing sub-groups. Neither will a sub-faculty plan benefit the 14 million undergraduates on campus, most who attend under-funded public colleges with no billion-dollar endowments or corporate angels to turn to. Community colleges, in particular, where about 6 million students are enrolled, can have up to 65% of classes taught by adjuncts. The sub-faculty plan is thus really a management tool available in the short-term to those colleges with deep pockets and deep readiness to entrench a lesser sub-faculty in their writing programs. Doug Hesse acknowledges such an outcome as a possibility. He is quoted in the IHE report saying he was disturbed by the degree of interest other WPAs took in DU’s new sub-faculty writing program, fearing that DU was installing a “Vichy"-type model(collaborating with the authorities desire to de-tenure faculty generally and to subordinate writing instructors particularly). But, Hesse is quoted as making peace with this because he feels that sub-faculty lines for writing teachers are at least good for writing students. Even if we knew for sure this was true, why must writing teachers be the only professionals in higher education called upon to make such sacrifices? A large private grant to finance Denver University’s program($10 million for Hesse’s project)is good fortune for one campus, but it offers no model for how we can solve the national disgrace of exploited adjuncts.

Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions. We probably adopt this strategy not so much because of any lack of interest or power but because of a longstanding conviction that for much of human behavior there are no relevant antecedents. The function of the inner man is to provide an explanation which will not be explained in turn. Explanation stops with him. He is not a mediator between past history and current behavior, he is a center from which behavior emanates. He initiates, originates, and creates, and in doing so he remains, as he was for the Greeks, divine. We say that he is autonomous—and, so far as a science of behavior is concerned, that means miraculous. The position is, of course, vulnerable. Autonomous man serves to explain only the things we are not yet able to explain in other ways. His existence depends upon our ignorance, and he naturally loses status as we come to know more about behavior. The task of a scientific analysis is to explain how the behavior of a person as a physical system is related to the conditions under which the human species evolved and the conditions under which the individual lives. Unless there is indeed some capricious or creative intervention, these events must be related, and no intervention is in fact needed. The contingencies of survival responsible for man’s genetic endowment would produce tendencies to act aggressively, not feelings of aggression. The punishment of sexual behavior changes sexual behavior, and any feelings which may arise are at best by-products. Our age is not suffering from anxiety but from the accidents, crimes, wars, and other dangerous and painful things to which people are so often exposed. Young people drop out of school, refuse to get jobs, and associate only with others of their own age not because they feel alienated but because of defective social environments in homes, schools, factories, and elsewhere. We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behavior and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior.

another showed him back in Berlin, reviewing a throng of grateful Germans from the balcony of the German chancery. He had led Germany to military glory against all odds. The Third Reich built by his Nazis seemed invincible. Yet the restless erstwhile artist and miracle-working warlord was not finished. In fact, the most ambitious act of Nazi world building was yet to come. In Mein Kampf Hitler had made it abundantly clear that the long-term plan of National Socialism was the elimination of the Jews and the enslavement of the Slavs. Both goals were contingent on the conquest of the Soviet Union. Since a large percentage of European Jewry lived within her borders and those of Poland, a war in the east was necessary. Poland had now fallen, and German military forces were already sweeping through the country rounding up its Jewish citizenry. But the Soviet Union—the heart of “Jewish-Bolshevism”—remained untouched. To overcome the Aryans’ greatest racial enemy and subdue the Slavs, a full-scale invasion was necessary. As 1941 opened, then, Hitler prepared for what came to be known as Operation Barbarossa. Bringing Nazi ideology to fulfillment, it proved to be the greatest invasion in history. Hitler before the Eiffel Tower Hitler’s plans for the invasion of Russia were laid out in a series of meetings and reports during the spring. They were defined by a combination of utopian vision and nihilistic contempt. Gathering his generals before him on March 30, the leader declared that the coming struggle was not merely one of army against army but of culture against culture. It would be a “clash of two ideologies,” he explained. The Communists and Nazis had erected their states on the ruins of Christendom. Both Christianity, with its principle of charity, and humanism, with its celebration of autonomous individual dignity, were bankrupt. Wars in the past, he observed, had accommodated such values. But mercy and chivalry were now dead. Between opposing armies, he declared “we must forget the notion” of sympathy.150 The coming conflict will be “a war of annihilation.”151 Hitler’s generals got the message. One, Erich Hoepner (d. 1944), subsequently declared to his men with a combination of Darwinian objectivity and Nietzschean ruthlessness: The war against Russia is an essential phase in the German nation’s struggle for existence. It is the ancient struggle of the Germanic peoples against Slavdom, the defense of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic tide, the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. That struggle must have as its aim the shattering of present-day Russia and therefore be waged with unprecedented hardness.

In place of a view of the genome as a static blueprint that operates independently of experience and only up to the moment of birth, we have come to understand the genome as a complex, dynamic set of self-regulating recipes that actively modulate every step of life. Nature is not a dictator hell-bent on erecting the same building regardless of the environment, but a flexible Cub Scout prepared with contingency plans for many occasions.

a tree that branches at every variable outcome (if they fire when we arrive, choose path A, if not, choose path B). But when dozens of saplings shoot out from those branches every second, the possibilities become so overwhelmingly complex as to render complete contingency planning futile.

You don’t have to choose the perfect investment or save exactly the right amount or predict your rate of return or spend hours watching television shows about the stock market or surfing the Internet for stock picks. You don’t need a plan for every contingency.

The careful driver is not actually imagining or planning for all of the countless contingencies that might crop up; nor is he merely competent to recognise and cope with any one of them, if it should arise. He has not foreseen the runaway donkey, yet he is not unprepared for it.

Because we can never eliminate uncertainty, we must learn to fight effectively despite it. We can do this by developing simple, flexible plans; planning for likely contingencies; developing standing operating procedures; and fostering initiative among subordinates.

A contingency plan is like a tree that branches at every variable outcome (if they fire when we arrive, choose path A, if not, choose path B). But when dozens of saplings shoot out from those branches every second, the possibilities become so overwhelmingly complex as to render complete contingency planning futile.

She snapped out of it, her instincts kicking in. She saw Srog, Brom, Kolk, Kendrick, Godfrey, and the others retreating with the soldiers down the back steps of the parapets, and she remembered their contingency plan. She had gone over the plan endlessly with her generals, and now it was surreal to see it put into motion.

If there was a risk that the vendor wouldn't come through for you, then you should have had a contingency plan.

Did you consider anything like the Infected?' Simon had asked. 'Not quite. But some of our other contingency plans might help us out with this particular mission.

Le "vitalisme" philosophique dissimule lui aussi sous les traits d'une logique impeccable une pensée fallacieuse et proprement infra-humaine. Les adorateurs de la "vie", pour lesquels la religion - ou la sagesse - n'est qu'un trouble-fête inintelligible, factice et morbide, oublient avant tout les vérités suivantes : que l'intelligence humaine est capable d'objectiver la vie et de s'y opposer d'une certaine manière, ce qui ne peut pas être dépourvu de sens, toute chose ayant sa raison d'être ; que c'est par capacité d'objectivation et d'opposition au subjectif que l'homme est homme, la vie et le plaisir étant communs aussi à toutes les créatures infra-humaines ; qu'il n'y a pas de la vie, mais aussi la mort, et qu'il n'y a pas que le plaisir, mais aussi la douleur, ce dont l'homme seul peut se rendre compte a priori ; que l'homme doit suivre sa nature comme les animaux suivent la leur, et qu'en la suivant pleinement il est porté à transcender les apparences et à leur donner une signification qui dépasse leur plan mouvant et qui les unit à une même réalité stable et universelle. Car l'homme, c'est l'intelligence, et l'intelligence, c'est le dépassement des formes et la réalisation de l'invisible Essence ; qui dit intelligence humaine, dit absoluité et transcendance. De toutes les créatures terrestres, l'homme seul sait : premièrement, que le plaisir est contingent et éphémère ; et deuxièmement, qu'il n'est pas partagé par tous, c'est-à-dire que d'autres ego ne jouissent pas du plaisir de "notre ego", et qu'il y a toujours - quelle que soit notre jouissance - d'autres créatures qui souffrent, et inversement ; ce qui prouve que le plaisir n'est pas tout, ni la vie. La religion ou la métaphysique surgissent bien plus profondément de la nature spécifiquement humaine - "nature surnaturelle" précisément dans ses profondeurs - que les caractères que l'homme partage avec l'animal et la plante. Réfuter l'erreur n'est pas ignorer que son existence est nécessaire ; les deux choses se situent sur des plans différents. Nous n'acceptions pas l'erreur, mais nous acceptons son existence, puisqu'"il faut qu'il y ait du scandale"..

Se convertir d’une religion à une autre, c’est non seulement changer de concepts et de moyen, mais aussi remplacer une sentimentalité par une autre. Qui dit sentimentalité, dit limitation : la marge sentimentale qui enveloppe chacune des religions historiques prouve à sa manière la limite de tout exotérisme et par conséquent la limite des revendications exotériques. Intérieurement ou substantiellement, la revendication religieuse est absolue, mais extérieurement ou formellement, donc sur le plan de la contingence humaine, elle est forcément relative ; si la métaphysique ne suffisait pas pour le prouver, les faits eux-mêmes le prouveraient. Plaçons-nous maintenant, à titre d’exemple, au point de vue de l’Islam exotérique, donc totalitaire : aux débuts de l’expansion musulmane, les circonstances étaient telles que la revendication doctrinale de l’Islam s’imposait d’une façon absolue ; mais plus tard, la relativité propre à toute expression formelle devait apparaître nécessairement. Si la revendication exotérique — non ésotérique — de l’Islam était absolue et non relative, aucun homme de bonne volonté ne pourrait résister à cette revendication ou à cet « impératif catégorique » : tout homme qui lui résisterait serait foncièrement mauvais, comme c’était le cas aux débuts de l’Islam, où on ne pouvait pas sans perversité préférer les idoles magiques au pur Dieu d’Abraham. Saint-Jean Damascène avait une fonction élevée à la cour du calife de Damas (4) ; il ne s’est pas converti à l’Islam, pas plus que ne le fit Saint-François d’Assise en Tunisie ni saint Louis en Egypte, ni saint Grégoire Palamas en Turquie (5). Or, il n’y a que deux conclusions possibles : ou bien ces saints étaient des hommes foncièrement mauvais, — supposition absurde puisque c’étaient des saints, — ou bien la revendication de l’Islam comporte, comme celle de toute religion, un aspect de relativité ; ce qui est métaphysiquement évident puisque toute forme a des limites et que toute religion est extrinsèquement une forme, l’absoluité ne lui appartenant que dans son essence intrinsèque et supraformelle. La tradition rapporte que le soufi Ibrāhīm ben Adham eut pour maître occasionnel un ermite chrétien, sans que l’un des deux se convertît à la religion de l’autre ; de même la tradition rapporte que Seyyid Alī Hamadānī, qui joua un rôle décisif dans la conversion du Cachemire à l’Islam, connaissait Lallā Yōgīshwari, la yōginī nue de la vallée, et que les deux saints avaient un profond respect l’un pour l’autre, malgré la différence de religion et au point qu’on a parlé d’influences réciproques (6). Tout ceci montre que l’absoluité de toute religion est dans la dimension intérieure, et que la relativité de la dimension extérieure devient forcément apparente au contact avec d’autres grandes religions ou de leurs saints. ---- Notes en bas de page ---- (4) C’est là que le saint écrivit et publia, avec l’acquiescement du calife, son célèbre traité à la défense des images, prohibées par l’empereur iconoclaste Léon III. (5) Prisonnier des Turcs pendant un an, il eut des discussions amicales avec le fils de l’émir, mais ne se convertit point, pas plus que le prince turc ne devint chrétien (6) De nos jours encore, les musulmans du Cachemire vénèrent Lallā, la Shivaïte dansante, à l’égal d’une sainte de l’Islam, à côté de Seyyid Alī ; les hindous partagent ce double culte. La doctrine de la sainte se trouve condensée dans un de ses chants : « Mon gourou ne m’a donné qu’un seul précepte. Il m’a dit : du dehors entre dans ta partie la plus intérieure. Ceci est devenu pour moi une règle ; et c’est pour cela que, nue, je danse » (Lallā Vākyāni, 94)

While you were gone, I began planning for the return of our Harvest Festival. Rava doesn’t want the event held. She told me to call it off.” “I know,” he wryly acknowledged. “She made me aware of your activities and her decision when I arrived.” “And?” “She won’t yield. She’s already sent word to the High Priestess.” I nodded, then asked, my voice barely audible, “And what do you say?” “I say…” He reached for my hands, determination building in his intense blue eyes. “I say we proceed with the festival until and unless the High Priestess comes here herself and brings it to a halt. Political fires aren’t interesting without kindling.” I smiled, and he took me into his arms, lightly kissing me. “At least we don’t have anything to worry about tonight,” I murmured as we lay down next to each other. “I always worry.” “Really? I wouldn’t have thought of you as the worrying kind.” “I worry when I cannot act,” he mused, drawing me close, and I felt life and strength flowing into me, warming me from head to toe. “I can handle heaven and hell, but not limbo.” “I thought you had no religion in Cokyri. How do you know about heaven and hell?” “We don’t practice religion, but we have education. I probably know more about your faith than you do.” I placed a hand on his chest and pushed myself up to look at him in mock umbrage. “Then tell me how our wedding will proceed.” “That I don’t know,” he said with a grin. “I suspect Hytanica’s marital traditions and rites would fill a volume more than double the rest of our history texts put together.” “You’re ridiculous!” I lightly smothered him with a pillow, then nestled upon his chest, content and ready for sleep. At some point in the night, I woke and looked over to see Narian staring at the ceiling. “What are you doing?” I asked, stifling a yawn. “Thinking.” “Do you want to tell me what you’re thinking about?” “Candidates for my new second-in-command. I have a feeling your Harvest Festival is going to bring matters to the breaking point between us and Rava. If things go our way and the High Priestess removes her, I intend to be the one to name her replacement.” “And this cannot wait until morning?” I asked, even though I knew how he would respond. “I believe in being prepared.” I nodded and closed my eyes. Anticipating, planning, developing strategies and counter strategies, was another ingrained aspect of Narian’s nature. As I drifted back to sleep, I wondered for how many contingencies he was prepared that I knew nothing about.

Set specific goals. 2. Define activities, resources needed, responsibilities. 3. Set a timetable for action. 4. Forecast outcomes, develop contingencies. 5. Formulate a detailed plan of action in time sequence. 6. Implement, supervise execution, and evaluate based on goals in step one.

There are many good things about Switzerland. The flag is a big plus. Also – possibly in reaction to the excess of meetings at CERN, the United Nations or the World Trade Organization – a Swiss political party formed in 2011 with a policy to ban PowerPoint. Contingency plans, including holding all meetings over the French border in the Prévessin site of CERN or (clearly very popular) enforcing a strict LaTeX-only policy, were discussed extensively.

Over 83 percent of executives told us they plan on increasing their use of contingent, part-time, or flexible workers in the next few years.

In Dorn’s account, Stilwell instructed him to “cook up a workable scheme and await orders,” and Dorn did just that, devising a contingency plan for an assassination that would have been worthy of a Hollywood thriller. The Gimo, or the Gissismo, or CKS, or Cash My Check, or Generalissimo, General of Generals, as Chiang was variously called by Americans, either respectfully or derisively, would be taken on a flight to Ramgarh, India, to inspect Chinese troops being trained there as part of the effort to improve China’s backward army. The pilot would pretend to have engine trouble and order his crew and passengers to bail out. Chiang would be ushered to the door of the plane wearing a faulty parachute and told to jump. “I believe it would work,” Stilwell told Dorn.

Churchill would not permit contingency planning for failure, knowing it would inevitably leak out and breed pessimism.

I like to pretend that I’m covering my tracks, bracing for any contingency. Ready for the worst, and all that jazz. I always feel better if there’s a plan in place. And in this case, the plan was, “Leave the blind guy in charge of the juvenile delinquents and everything will be just fine. Probably.

The way of suffering was the Father's plan. It was the Father's will. The cross was not Satan's idea. The passion of Christ was not the result of human contingency. It was not the accidental contrivance of Caiaphas, Herod, or Pilate. The cup was prepared, delivered, and administered by almighty God.

How often, again, a person looks forward to some great event that will change the whole environment and interest of his life. A person anticipating such an event looks forward and plans and considers. He asks himself what effect this will produce upon his character: Will he be better or worse for it? Will it make him stronger or weaker? Will it draw out the spirit of sympathy or of antagonism? He imagines himself — and he has, perhaps, a very vivid imagination — in his new surroundings; he lives in them and brings all possible contingencies to bear upon himself that he may as much as possible gauge and measure himself so that he may not be taken unawares. At last the event so long anticipated comes to pass, and all the forecasts prove to be utterly wrong. The effect upon him is different altogether either from what he hoped it might be or feared it would be. The man placed in the setting of circumstances different from those which he had long been used to finds that he is utterly unlike what he had imagined himself to be. His hopes and fears were alike miscalculations. He had planned that the same man as had known himself to be should be in these new surroundings. There was to him, as he looked forward to the change, only one uncertain quantity, and that was the new material or moral or religious world in which he was to find himself. As to these, he had made no mistake; the mistake lay in supposing that he knew the person who was to be placed amid these circumstances. There he was completely mistaken. No sooner did the change take place than he found that he no longer knew the man. He was amazed to find himself wholly different from what he had imagined himself to be. New faults came to light; new virtues sprang to his defense; old temptations came to life in the new soil, and he found that the mere change of external things shows him to be altogether a different person from what he had thought.

We are, well, we were, the Ignavian. Funny thing is my people knew our world was on the path to destruction long before it had taken place, and do you know? They didn’t care. I believe I cared for perhaps ten minutes. I sat in my chair and thought about drawing up a contingency plan, but it all came to nothing. I got bored quickly and gave up the idea. Thinking can be so tedious, can’t it?

Forgive me, but," he begins, and I know this can be going nowhere good, "what about the men who watch our channel? Do we really want to look so biased? We can't alienate half our viewership." I see Katherine open her mouth to respond, but then I must enter some kind of alternate reality in which I think I'm the best one to take these questions, as I open my big mouth and beat her to the punch. "Who's to say they'll be alienated, though? Men watch plenty of TV shows and movies led by women. Or if they don't, they certainly should. We've been put through five million Fast and the Furious and James Bond movies, for goodness' sake. And if they're opposed to watching and learning from women, because they think we're boring or don't get our perspectives, well, I reckon they're part of the problem." I fold my arms over my chest defiantly, then lose my remaining nerve and avert my eyes from those of the CEO. When I look at the other women instead, they're all staring at me with some measure of shock, some looking amused and impressed on top of that. Katherine is the first one to shake herself out of it and narrows her gaze on Geoffrey Block, CEO, once more. "It may also be of interest to you that if this series doesn't happen at Friends of Flavor, I plan on hosting it on my personal site, the Kat's Muse. I have advertisers who have long expressed interest in helping me launch my own videos, but I've been reluctant to take any of FoF's thunder. I would feel obligated to make it clear, though, that I was only hosting the series because this channel had rejected the proposal." My jaw drops along with Katherine's figurative mic. She kept that little contingency plan from us yesterday, but damn. Of course she had a secret weapon in her back pocket. Lily pipes up, "And if you all didn't know, men do not make up half of Friends of Flavor viewers. More like thirty percent. Meaning women are seventy percent. Maybe worth looking at who's really getting alienated." Well okay, Lily. For someone who spends so much of the time off in her own mental universe, she sure knows how to pop back down to earth and spit facts when needed.

The following are some of the most common mistakes made by project managers: Not clearly understanding how or ensuring that the project is aligned with organizational objectives. Not properly managing stakeholder expectations throughout the project. Not gaining agreement and buy-in on project goals and success criteria from key stakeholders. Not developing a realistic schedule that includes all work efforts, task dependencies, bottom-up estimates, and assigned leveled resources. Not getting buy-in and acceptance on the project schedule. Not clearly deciding and communicating who is responsible for what. Not utilizing change control procedures to manage the scope of the project. Not communicating consistently and effectively with all key stakeholders. Not executing the project plan. Not tackling key risks early in the project. Not proactively identifying risks and developing contingency plans (responses) for those risks. Not obtaining the right resources with the right skills at the right time. Not aggressively pursuing issue resolution. Inadequately defining and managing requirements. Insufficiently managing and leading the project team.

Don’t forget you’re leaving, my conscience chimes in, keeping me grounded, as always.

American Airlines Customer Service Number-+1-855-653-5006 American Airlines Customer Service Number We also have plans for all airports we regularly serve (including our designated diversion airports) to make reasonable efforts to share facilities and gates with other carriers in an emergency and during irregular operations such as extreme weather. Gates would be made available in accordance with established operational priorities (i.e. medical emergencies, maintenance concerns) and local gate compatibility constraints. If a gate is not available and deplaning is necessary, other equipment such as air stairs will be made available to deplane passengers. Unless otherwise noted, marketed international and/or codeshare flights (AA flight number operated by another carrier) follow their own tarmac delay contingency plan. This contingency plan is explicitly separate from and not a part of these carriers' contract of carriage.