"A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist"
About this Quote
The analogy works because it borrows legitimacy from two domains where starting over is expected, even celebrated. Athletes get new seasons by design; artists face blank canvases as part of the craft. Business, by contrast, pretends to be linear and controllable: milestones, Gantt charts, quarterly targets. Augustine quietly punctures that fantasy. A “revised schedule” admits that plans collide with reality, but it also offers permission to keep playing without losing face. The subtext is managerial: don’t panic, don’t litigate blame, reframe the miss as iteration.
There’s also a sly critique of corporate ritual baked in. Schedules can become performance art: a document that absorbs anxiety, promises certainty, then gets repainted when the world refuses to cooperate. By invoking athlete and artist, Augustine suggests business survival depends on adopting their psychology - the ability to treat disruption as a new set of constraints rather than an existential verdict.
Context matters: Augustine’s career in large-scale, high-stakes industries (where “on time” is often aspirational) makes the line read less like optimism and more like a seasoned coping strategy. Rescheduling isn’t progress; it’s endurance with better branding.
Quote Details
| Topic | New Beginnings |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: Augustine's Laws and Major System Development Programs (Norman Ralph Augustine, 1983)ISBN: 9780915928811
Evidence: A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist.. The quote appears as Law Number XXV in Norman R. Augustine's own work. I found strong secondary evidence tying this exact wording to Augustine's book 'Augustine's Laws' (1986), and Open Library states that the 1986 book is a revised edition of 'Augustine's Laws and Major System Development Programs' (1983), indicating the earlier 1983 AIAA volume is the likely first book publication. However, I was not able to directly inspect the scanned page of the 1983 edition to extract a page number from the primary text itself. Because of that, the identification of 1983 as the first publication is well-supported bibliographically but not fully page-verified from the scanned original in this search session. Other candidates (1) The Principalship from A to Z (Ronald Williamson, Barbara R. Blackburn, 2016) compilation95.7% Ronald Williamson, Barbara R. Blackburn. Z. Zero. In. on. Your. Schedule. DOI : 10.4324 / 9781315707792-26 A revised ... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Augustine, Norman Ralph. (2026, March 8). A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-revised-schedule-is-to-business-what-a-new-155715/
Chicago Style
Augustine, Norman Ralph. "A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist." FixQuotes. March 8, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-revised-schedule-is-to-business-what-a-new-155715/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist." FixQuotes, 8 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-revised-schedule-is-to-business-what-a-new-155715/. Accessed 19 Mar. 2026.




