Pure Schmaltz

A few years ago, I was invited to give a presentation to a very large financial services company's project managers. I spoke about maturity, which was a hot topic at that time there. Their definition of maturity included consistency, prescription, prediction, where big things proposed become big things achieved. I presented a different notion of maturity, one which more closely matches what I've experienced as I've matured. I am, for instance, no better at predicting outcomes than I ever was, unless I'm doing something I've done many, many, many times before. Of course, no one's ever done their latest project before, so project maturity might be about out-growing the naive notion that one could consistently achieve by prescribing and predicting. Slip over here for more ...

Whoever labeled economics 'The Dismal Science' was right on the money. Maybe even right on the money supply. But probably not right about anything else. Economists specialize in counting uncountable things, gathering statistics that serve as 'indicators', and posing future scenarios based upon schools of thought. Dismal. Slip over here for more ...

Projects@Work published the third installment of my Project Ethics series this morning.

Project Ethics (Part III)

There's a link back to the second installment there, too.

This series, the final installment will be posted next week, encapsulates what I've retained about project work. The distillation might make some of it hard for you to swallow, but this is how it is for me over here. What seemed at first necessary knowledge has evaporated in practice to become beside the point. What wouldn't even register then on my innocent radar has taken central position in my understanding now.

The executive summary: Project Ethics are about choice. Once any action becomes a must-do mandate, ethics evaporates. Without choice, there can be no ethics. Does it follow then that creating choice is the key to satisfying the ethical responsibilities of project work?

The challenge is that the choice points are cloaked, hidden from casual observation. It might even be true for you, as it most certainly has been for me, that the greater the choice point, the less it feels like one in that moment where my choice might make all the difference.

The series became a treatise on mindfulness. Please feel free to comment on the P@W site. The editor there likes people to leave comments, and so do I, though I don't always know how to respond to them.

Chuck Spinney is at it again. This time, he unwraps what might well be the strategy behind Obama's remarkable election victory (although I did hear a Faux News commentator yesterday wondering why he only won by such a narrow popular vote margin---had his strategy been mindless, he suggested, he should have won by a much greater margin...). Anyway, this explanation (the one linked to below, not the Faux commentator's) is interesting, even if it isn't really explaining anything remarkable. Slip over here for more ...

Two years ago, I celebrated International Project Managers' Day by publishing a rant entitled Why Project Managers Can't Manage Projects. Last year, I celebrated by preparing for a workshop, and posting a small prayer. This year, I'm not celebrating.

News yesterday from a Silicon Valley correspondent reports that PMI meetings there have swelled with attendants. Why? Lots and lots of PMs looking for work. It's been several years since I attended any PM-related conference where the out-of-work PMs and PM consultant wanna-bes didn't greatly outnumber those who were there to share information.

Just yesterday, I reviewed yet another job description claiming to want someone capable of bringing projects in consistently on-time, on-budget, and on-spec. Slip over here for more ...

Just before election day in 1968, a fellow in advertising who worked for Nixon wrote a newspaper ad that began, "It will be quiet on Tuesday. No speeches. No motorcades. No paid political announcements. It's a very special day, just for grown-ups. America votes Tuesday…and . . . on Tuesday, the shouting and the begging and the threatening and the heckling will be silenced. It's very quiet in a voting booth. And nobody's going to help you make up your mind. So - just for that instant - you'll know what the man you're voting for will do a thousand times a day for the next four years. Now it's your turn." (from Bill Moyers Journal October 31, 2008 essay)

One Easter when I was a kid, my folks bought 'us kids' a baby chicken (dyed pink), a baby rabbit, and a baby duck. The rabbit bit the chicken, which died, and the rabbit escaped. The duckling survived, but having no mother duck to teach it how to properly duck, it took lessons from the family dog, who, being a dog, taught it to bark, chase kids, and loyally follow me around. We eventually had to fence this duck in because he'd chase bicycles and cars. Later, we bought a second duck to keep the first one company, but the original wouldn't have anything to do with the late-comer, who eventually moved into the duck community in the city park. Years later, the original duck was killed by a rampaging dog.

I mention this duck because I've been deeply considering what it is that I do, and as usual, this reflection leaves me feeling like an odd duck. Slip over here for more ...

The first of my four installments considering The Ethical Responsibilities of Project Work was published last week in the Projects@Work e-zine.

What prompts me to write about ethics now? In Thomas Friedman's Sunday, October 18 NYT column, he makes the provocative assertion that "We’re all connected and nobody is in charge." It seems to this humble chronicler that management science ignores this one great truth, assuming that we are natively disconnected and that someone's in charge. Consider a world where Friedman's assertion holds true AND where we assume otherwise. What kind of witch hunt might result? I imagine torches and pitchforks, accusations and indictments, the righteous search for those who were supposed to be in charge and failed to properly connect us, initiating yet another round of symbolic regulations (how do you spell Sarbaines-Oxley?) intended to hold those SOBs accountable. Again. Slip over here for more ...

The road to best practice seems twisty, bumpy, and fog-shrouded. The most frequently overheard phrase throughout my career? "We tried that once and it didn't work."

Once? You tried it once? Then concluded that it never would work?

Well, it wasn't just them saying this, I've said it myself.

What happened to "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again?"

Not in the modern corporation, thank yew. Not in my backyard, either. There, the phrase is , "if at first you don't succeed, you've failed." Utterly. Supported by, "We tried that once and it didn't work." Slip over here for more ...

We were doing an extended engagement in NYC a few years ago and, as we often do when working there, we played what we call Broadway Roulette. Show up at Duffy Square a half hour before curtain time and see what tickets are left, buy a couple and head off to a show. We happened one evening on the revival of Kiss Me, Kate, and were delighted. This one piece (in the above YouTube video), where two hoodlums, backstage to shakedown the male lead for gambling debts "accidently" wander on stage during a performance, was the highlight of the show for me, because it reminded me that whatever truth we might nudge out at the client's shop, we needed to respect their traditions, or, more to the point, Brush Up Our Shakespeare. Slip over here for more ...