Wit & Attitude Quote by Charles E. Wilson

Wilson’s line has the clipped, factory-floor bluntness of a man who lived through the era when “management” stopped being a genteel office function and became an industrial religion. He starts by puncturing a comforting fantasy: that competence can be engineered so perfectly it eliminates human error. “No plan can prevent a stupid person…” is deliberately rude, almost prosecutorial, because it reframes failure as a feature of reality, not an outlier. There will always be someone who misreads the moment, pulls the lever, drives the truck, signs the form.

The pivot is where the real management philosophy hides. Wilson isn’t excusing bad outcomes; he’s shifting the goalposts from total prevention to damage containment. The phrase “the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time” sketches the anatomy of catastrophe: not just a mistake, but a mistake plus location plus timing. That’s where systems fail.

Then comes the quietly chilling word: “concentration.” In industrial terms, he’s talking about preventing risk from pooling - too much flammable material in one bay, too many critical decisions in one person’s inbox, too many eggs in one supplier’s basket. But the term also carries 20th-century weight: concentration as the condition that turns manageable hazards into mass harm. The subtext is decentralization as ethics, not just efficiency.

Wilson’s intent is pragmatic and faintly cynical: you can’t plan away stupidity, but you can plan so one person’s stupidity doesn’t become everyone’s tragedy. A good plan doesn’t create perfection; it creates firebreaks.