I think grammar hammered me first. I could not figure it out. It seemed as if everyone else in the class understood the difference between a past participle and a gerund. Not me. French was a set of perfectly understandable words strung together in absolutely impossible ways. My stomach revolted. It gurgled and sizzled and after half a year, my doctor suggested that I drop the class. I did.

This is when I learned that I was not smart. Sentenced to a semester of wood shop, which was presided over by a crew-cut, hanging judge of a man with the creativity of a band saw and the sensitivity of double ought sand paper. "Mr. Schmaltz," he chided me, "your designs are a waste of good wood. Copy something out of the book!" I became a reluctant member of the group bound for industrial jobs, fated to work with deafening machinery and stupefying supervisors. I was not smart.

I hid out through junior high and high school, taking the bonehead sections when I could get away with it and adapting when I could not. Typing was a problem similar to French. How I did it was more important than the end product, and I could not figure out the how. The typing teacher said that I would not be able to succeed without typing skills and he was right. What he could not foresee was that I would learn to type- albeit with two or three or, on a really hot day, four nearly simultaneously choreographed fingers. (I hold the others in reserve as insurance against carpal tunnel syndrome.)

Math was a problem, too. No figuring it out. A set of rules, randomly drawn against an unimaginable back drop. Why is any of this even interesting? I still don't know. I survived (barely) by guessing and by copying things out of the book, as my shop teacher had so wisely instructed me to do. I was clearly not college material and I knew it. College would simply offer more opportunities to get found out- caught in the act of not knowing how.

I did eventually go to university- starting seven years after high school, after riding a career as a single acoustic performing artist- writing and performing songs while supporting myself with a string of casual labor jobs. I had tasted many forms of industrial labor. Most were mindless jobs where sticking to the proscribed procedure was considered to be more important than the product. An exception was pot washing. I really liked washing pots. This was a job where they couldn't care less how I got it done. They just wanted clean pots. They, as the old advertisement suggested, wanted tuna that tasted good, not tuna with good taste. Same thing with writing and performing- the end product was the only piece judged by the audience. They could never have known how that was engineered- and most didn't care to know.

Had they known, had some lab-coated efficiency expert observed me writing songs or washing pots, I'm confident that I would have been judged a bone head in those activities, too. The trick to a successful life, I learned from life, was to hide out from the efficiency experts and to engage in activities where the product was more revered and more observable than the process by which the product was produced. I could succeed in this product-oriented world. In the process-oriented one, the best I could do is not get found out.

I think the problem started when I taught myself to read. When I showed up for the first day of first grade, I could already read. I didn't learn how to do it like everyone else did because I didn't have to. Most things that I do today I taught myself how to do. I taught myself how to play the guitar, play the piano, type, write, teach, cook, garden, and manage projects. I don't do any of these things like anyone else does them. But, I'm learning rather late in life, this does not mean that I am not smart.

I have lately been working in one of the most prestigious scientific communities in the world. Even though the closest I ever came to scientific training was a ninth grade bonehead general science class that I took to avoid my high school science requirement, I feel a curious camaraderie there. This last week I tested a hypothesis that has been swimming around in the back of my head for some time. I mentioned in passing to one of the scientists that I'd noticed a real difference between engineers and scientists. Engineers are much more process oriented, focusing upon how stuff gets done, while scientists are much more focused upon outcomes without regard to how they are achieved. I explained a bit about my background and got in return a, "Oh, you too?" response. This guy had taught himself calculus and had earned a Ph.D. in physics without attending graduate-level physics courses. I tested this idea with several others and found everyone I met there personally familiar with the feelings that I had experienced, hiding out from the process-oriented overseer.

Maybe, I conclude, that being smart is not so much different from being a bone head. We can, by the way we judge success, make a bone head out of the most gifted genius. We can, I believe, also make a gifted genius out of the most obvious bone head.

What does any of this have to do with project management? Lots! Judging the goodness of a project by how well individuals adhere to a defined process will disqualify some of the most capable folks on the team. Process for me is always a guideline, a menu of possible alternatives. I am accused of not being able to do anything the same way once- and I truly never know how I will get anything accomplished. I have no sense of time- it is not a fixed and finite boundary. I accomplish wonderful results, but never- never- by the method proscribed. I am not being difficult, just me. For me and for those like me, a plan is what is in the way of doing what I really should be doing; a set of definite milestones looks like a string of millstones waiting for me to carry them out of the way.

I think it was George Patton who refused to give process-oriented orders. He told his subordinates what he wanted them to accomplish and left the how up to them. This meant that he could never judge the goodness of the effort half way through. It also meant that the result could be achieved in whatever way seemed best to those trying to achieve it. He was unusually successful.

The process-oriented engineering perspective that has so influenced project management theory and practice in modern times is not universally useful. This cookbook is missing a few recipes. There are some meals that cannot be created by proscribed method. As I learned in junior high French class, if the how has to be satisfied, the what is often foregone as well. Mistaking the process for the product is a terrible misunderstanding capable of creating boneheads out of geniuses and disqualifying overseers out of the most well-intended project managers.