Are they really jokers, or were the tasks unreasonable in the first place? The only way to know is to understand the tasks in detail, which I suspect the author doesn't.
The whole "just get it done" thing sounds impressive, but it doesn't hold up in reality. Just cure AIDS. What are you waiting for? People are dying! Get that cure finished by Monday.
Also note that there's a large border zone where things are possible but require sacrifice. They could get it done by sacrificing their leisure, their health, their social status, their unrelated duties, their morals.... It's up to them to decide how much of that is worth it. This is not a decision to take lightly.
The whole "just get it done" thing sounds impressive, but it doesn't hold up in reality.
Yes it does, you're just not reading it properly. Assume you're being attacked by a wild animal, which attitude is more helpful out of the following?
1) I will do anything to overpower it and kill it, or any acceptable substitute such as distracting or trapping it, or escaping in any other fashion.
2) Well, it might be too powerful for me, and maybe I'm too tired, and if it's getting dark I can't see it as well, and I guess I'll try, but it's unreasonable to think I can win, and in this situation having precisely accurate beliefs is my highest priority, so I'll start off by assessing how energetic it looks and estimating how powerful it is before I start doing anything, if it's too big I won't bother.
It's "duh" obvious that in a survival situation, the former might get you out, the latter might not. It's "duh" obvious that you might not win, whatever you do, but that's not relevent because you don't get points for trying, you either survive, or you die.
Now, comparing a survival situation to a project, or a company, or any everyday life situation, isn't really a fair comparison. But comparing the attitude you hold can be a fair comparison.
By your reply you are implying the OP is so dense they don't understand that some things can't be done. Do you honestly think that's true? You're giving zero credit to their intelligence at all.
The "just do it" attitude is not supposed to be telling you that "you can do anything rah rah just will it and it will happen, laws of physics and human limits be damned".
It's supposed to be telling you that hurdles are OK, you will meet them, and you can jump them, or go round them, or plough straight through them, or move them, or pay someone else to move them, or rent a car and drive through them, or burn them down, or argue the race to different track with different hurdles, or setup your own athletics federation and recruit athletes and viewers for races without hurdles, they're all fine, but doing nothing won't help, nor will giving up. If you want to solve a problem, getting points for trying won't get the problem solved.
"Just get it done - you can" isn't meant as a literally true fact you have to agree with, it's a helpful attitude to hold and act on even while knowing it's not literally true.
So why haven't you cured AIDS? What in your argument (or the OP's) changes when the difficulty of the problem is raised to absurdity?
Some problems are easy. Some are hard. Some are too hard to be worth solving. Some are essentially unsolvable. When someone argues problems are in category 2 by ignoring categories 3 and 4, they lose credibility.
As for trusting the OP's intelligence, he appears to be a marketer ranting at engineers. Even if he's extremely intelligent, he doesn't have the knowledge to judge if what he wants is possible or not.
Not sure if you're being deliberately obtuse or if you really don't see the point.
Compare:
Problems involved in curing AIDS: Needs a biotechnology background, a medical background, a chemistry background, an understanding of disease processes and treatment processes, FDA approval trials, pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Problems mentioned in the article: two people disagreeing on how Amazon S3 should be setup because they aren't happy which account to use or who should pay. Asking the leader to make "stupid nitpicky decisions" which they could make, but don't. Not deciding which email/newsletter program to buy. Not proceeding with what they agreed and instead generating ideas for other kinds of possible business model.
I haven't cured AIDS because I literally can't. They haven't registered an Amazon S3 account because ... what?.
As for trusting the OP's intelligence, he appears to be a marketer ranting at engineers.
And if he was saying "I asked you to have this facebook killer done by last week. Lee, where's that scalable S3 backed website I ordered you to write? Sam, your friend with the content industry connection, I need a film licensing agreement for streaming, come on, I expected better of you. Jon, I told you to sign up some people, Google Plus had millions of users in its first weeks, how many have you cold-called?
Then I'd be right behind you calling him a clueless PHB and a pox on all right-thinking people.
But he isn't doing that. These people agreed a project on a rushed timescale that they voluntarily comitted to - presumably they were all confident it was a solvable problem.
The whole "just get it done" thing sounds impressive, but it doesn't hold up in reality. Just cure AIDS. What are you waiting for? People are dying! Get that cure finished by Monday.
Also note that there's a large border zone where things are possible but require sacrifice. They could get it done by sacrificing their leisure, their health, their social status, their unrelated duties, their morals.... It's up to them to decide how much of that is worth it. This is not a decision to take lightly.