Everybody pick up a rock! Leadership and management in early times were about the same as now.

• Author: Wiesner, Pat

YOU JUST CAN'T BELIEVE IT--WHAT THEY BUILT IN Europe in the 1600s and even earlier. My wife and I recently took what we think of as a dream trip, spending a couple of weeks in Spain and Portugal. Lots of jokes are made about all the castles and palaces, but they are everywhere and they are incredible.

This country, the U.S., is just 200 years old. Portugal and Spain are 2,200 years old! We are just beginners. If you want to see something older than 200 years in this country you have to start looking at mountains or other geography.

In Portugal you leave an "Autopista" as good as any part of Interstate 25 here, and instantly take a 600-year trip back in time. The streets in the towns become one-car wide and are made of cobblestone, and just about every burg is complete with a castle built on top of the biggest hill and often surrounded by what is left of a protective city wall built by Moors or Romans. We saw the ruins of Roman aqueducts and houses built some 200 years B.C. At times I felt like James Bond driving through narrow streets between the old buildings with people needing to jump out of the way as I passed.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

While we were visiting a beautiful, huge castle, the exterior at least twice the size of the Pepsi Center, I wondered out loud how they could have done this without tools, cranes, trucks, bulldozers, etc. One of the caretakers told us it took 50,000 men some 30 years to build it. This is more people than work for United Airlines! How did they do it? How did they get anything done? Very few could read or write; there was no way to talk to 100 men at a time, much less 50,000.

The problems of leadership and management had to be massive.

First, you have to get everyone willing and ready to pick up a rock. Probably in those days slavery was a pretty good motivator. But the results were so beautiful and have lasted so long that I can't believe that a lot of it wasn't done with lots of care and pride. That would have required some real, people-oriented leadership.

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