I have taught and consulted in some of the most successful organizations in the world. They have one thing in common. They are absolutely miserable places to try to be a project manager.

These organizations hold their project managers responsible for their projects' success or failure then they systematically withhold the means for the project manager's success. They demand provably unreasonable deadlines, deadlines which are not met. Success hangs from a thread spun by a wily story teller, not the mutual satisfaction of good work well done. They ask for the truth, then discount or dismiss the bearer who dares to cross the party line. They bait and they switch.

They let the project manager propose their own schedule then change their minds about what the project should deliver, then they hold the project manager's feet to the fire for not delivering on the original commitment. They want fixed prices and variable specifications. They expect the impossible and more often than is good for anyone involved get close enough to it that they believe they can summon the power of the Gods to their petty objectives.

I see in the horizon tonight the death of project management. It was a different, a noble profession in its time, when industry was mechanizing brutal physical labor. But that time left us long ago. Now the techniques are misunderstood and misplaced, applied as ineffectively as if we expected water to hammer rivets or rivets to hold a story together.

The regimen of our barbarous ancestors asks us to fit into the coat we wore as children. It asks us to forget the lessons we've learned at such terrible cost. It asks us to stay naive and to act dumb and to pretend that we don't know better. It asks us to stay in our places and obey the lunatic ravings of the vice president in charge of this merger, who is terrified that someone will discover that he hasn't a clue what to do next except to demand, and belittle, and blame. It asks us to sacrifice, to work in an organization that terrifies us as much as it terrifies them without ever mentioning how scared we are, without ever acknowledging how little joy there is in coming to work each day.

And so we don't really plan. We go through the motions knowing that we'll be more judged by our superficial adherence to process and procedure than we'll ever be judged by results. Neither do we build community. We are all about fed up with this operation and if we weren't in hock up to our tan lines and lusting after that next bonus (which we are sure will skyrocket us into freedom at last), we'd have left here the day after we started working here. And we know it's not worth it. And we know we'd better just keep our heads down and proceed as if it was.

Last week I taught a workshop in one of the most successful organizations in the world. When I asked a roomful of project managers how terrifying it was to be a project manager there, one sheepishly reported that it was an unrelenting four point five on a five point scale. The rest silently agreed. A succession of mergers, instigated with no forethought, were set in these project managers' laps. None shirked their duty. Several had not survived. Those projects that failed embarrassingly had project managers that had to leave the company. The survivors were exhausted from years of such unrelenting pressure with the prospect that the future held similar challenges.

These years of unending unwinnable challenges had metastasized into acquiescence. The survivors had lost the power to say no. The organization demanded positive feedback, as if useful control information could be so codified. The survivors drag dead bodies across their finish lines, singing the praises of a team that never could have taken root in such harsh soil.

The gallows humor sparked giggles as their stories unfolded. Requirements to plan each project to conclusion in detail before the requirements are framed. Standards that say a good project manager should be able to bring such a project in "on time, on spec, and on budget." Scope creep is vilified, as if the scope were reasonably bounded in the first place. It's a tower of Babel, anyway, since no two constituencies share the same dialect or the same perspective on the objective of any project.

Such stupidity trumps anything project management might offer. Even the traditional project management techniques fall apart if no one can talk about what's really going on and no one's allowed to understand the project or the objective before estimating the effort needed to achieve whatever it is we're building here.

Of course the easy suggestions center around rationalizing this whole affair-- as if that were either possible and beneficial. In a paper-rock-scissors game where rational and irrational are involved, bet on irrational every time. Irrationality can trump any spark of reason. My prescription is greater irrationality; if we are going to succeed we must throw off this child's cloak of rational management. The world today has gone mad- we're better off being crazier than it is than we are being saner than thou.

"Anything but that" strategies are our only hope. True North project guidance strategies was founded on the principle that what seems to be an "anything but that" idea is very likely to be the most useful in this crazy world. When your guts tell you to stuff it, let it explode. When your intuition is whispering in your ear, listen -- then act. We have for too long been swallowing when we should have been spitting up, suffocating when we could have been breathing.

Bottom line is that if there's nothing for you in it, you're much better off not being involved. If you must live in chains to be free, check the logic of your reasoning before you suggest that any "anything but that" choice seems crazy. We have a choice, it seems, to be driven crazy or driving our selves there. I'm packing a lunch and fingering my keys. How about you?