Boondoggles and White Elephants

Abstract

The term Boondoggle is used to describe a project that wastes time and money, or one that generally is known to be futile long before it is shut down. The word is said to have been coined in the early 1930s by Robert H. Link, an American scoutmaster, for the braided leather lanyard made and worn by Boy Scouts. Hence, in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when millions of jobs were given to the unemployed in the US to get the economy moving again, it was applied to projects involving the teaching of simple manual skills, regardless of their ultimate benefit.

The mistakes we make and the projects that fail to produce what was expected are not in vain if we take the opportunity to learn from them. Some argue that failures are essential to making progress. The issue seems to be that there is much to be improved upon in systematically bringing forth lessons from the past to improve future performance.

It is better to learn from others’ mistakes than from one’s own experience.

–Otto von Bismarck