Pure Schmaltz

Economies of Snail

david@projectcommunity.com — 2008-11-18T09:32:35-08:00

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.

But this was a huge enterprise aiming at getting even larger, targeting economies of scale....

I once calculated that if my newborn son continued growing at the rate he grew that first month, he'd outweigh the Empire State Building before he was twenty.... A lot of wineries that pre-sell everything they produce and don't aspire to get any bigger than they've ever been.... When their value outgrew the volume of all other trades, they became an ever-taller house of cards balanced on the head of a relatively ever-tinier pin.... Though this created ever more jobs for managers, it resulted in ever less space for the people populating those positions to do what people do well....

Those who embraced something less than the industrial ideal of growing to produce an ever-larger scale slime trail were marginalized during the recent run-up.

The Dismal Science

david@projectcommunity.com — 2008-11-16T08:27:52-08:00

Those who might really understand are so distrusted by those who don't, they can't explain a thing to anyone else's satisfaction.... Dismal again.

Fact might be that none of us have any personal experience with 'an economy,' which doesn't exist anywhere but as a network of figments.... We thrive on 'em. Until they do us in.

Our certainty is the most curious part of our relationship with figments.... The size of the boat relative to the size of the body of water that formerly floated it puts the bailer in a weak position.... And the bucket remarkably small in comparison.

I read this week that the value of hedged instruments was estimated at perhaps ten times the annual gross world product.... Well, few understood how to value what was there before, either, but it's easier to float on a positive figment than a negative one. We love positive figments and fear the negative ones.

Maybe we only ever come close to experience the real power of collective figment certainty when the bottom falls out from under our confidently maintained fantasy because we experience real hunger then.

ProjectEthics3

david@projectcommunity.com — 2008-11-13T12:35:44-08:00

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 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.... 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.... The editor there likes people to leave comments, and so do I, though I don't always know how to respond to them.

MnM

david@projectcommunity.com — 2008-11-08T08:33:35-08:00

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.

"The M&M or Motherhood and Mismatch Strategy was conceived by the American strategist, Col. John R.... The basic goal of an M&M strategy is to build support for and attract the uncommitted to your cause by framing a "motherhood" position -- i.e., a position no one can object to, like the mythical "motherhood, apple pie, and the American way" -- and then inviting your opponent in to repeatedly attack it and, in so doing, smash himself to pieces at the mental and the even more decisive moral level of conflict. Self-destruction will happen inevitably, if you can successfully induce your adversary into attacking your motherhood position in a way that exposes mismatches among the three poles of his moral triangle, defined by (1) What your opponent says he is; (2) What he really is as defined by his actions; and (3) the World he has to deal with. Whether consciously or not, I believe Obama has an intuitive feel for the moral leverage inherent in the M&M strategy and this enabled him to outmaneuver McCain and his campaign and bring them to the verge of mental and moral collapse.... I claim that while teamwork is nice and even useful, it cannot meaningfully influence outcome without using it with a broader, ProjectCommunity mindset that considers everyone who can effect and everyone effected by the effort on equal us-ness with the core team.... Even those who concede, but continue to consider the community to be comprised of 'stakeholders', over time grow to appreciate what it feels like to be considered a vampire with stakeholders stalking them.

I'm also seeing this strategy used in what feels to me to be a destructive way, though I guess any strategy that succeeds in producing an outcome I don't support might be fairly characterized as destructive.

Requiem for International Project Managers' Day

david@projectcommunity.com — 2008-11-06T12:44:47-08:00

This year, I'm not celebrating.

News yesterday from a Silicon Valley correspondent reports that PMI meetings there have swelled with attendants.... 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.

Contracting for government work these days requires the applicant to engage in the most absurd fantasizing, as if, before work began, one could with some precision, spreadsheet hours by major task, then sign some dotted line validation of the bid's accuracy.

I thought we might have learned better by now.... What passes for professional practice in the Project Management "Profession" today wouldn't quite qualify as prostitution in most professions, and would be indictable, even convict-able in several. What went wrong?

I think the aspiration that focused upon making project management a profession on par with dentistry or occupational therapy turned it into its opposite.... More critically, where will we convince anyone chased away by all this foolishness to come back and risk doing some real discovering, some genuine skulduggery to accomplish something, anything never even imagined before?

In celebration of International Project Managers' Day, don't join in any celebration.... What we used to have to earn with every engagement, the certification to actually guide the effort, could only be bestowed afterwards, and had little currency the next time. Hired with misgivings, misunderstood, sometimes reviled most of the way, the worthy ones walked away from the successful ones with a little less than a nod of appreciation, and needed not even that!

Election Day

david@projectcommunity.com — 2008-11-04T09:04:06-08:00

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.... It's a very special day, just for grown-ups.... 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."

TuneSmithing

david@projectcommunity.com — 2008-10-22T05:23:09-07:00

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.

Like my duck, I imprinted early on a medium of expression that few would equate to my later career(s).... Silly or serious, I have pretty much always been a songwriter.

Because of this, I have an odd-duck sense of form and style that remains mysterious, even to me.... I'd try to explain what was missing, but even to me, my descriptions sounded like so much odd-duck quacking.

What is this felt sense?... So is the craft of life.

Odd ducklings that we all are, we each imprinted early upon some primary means for expressing ourselves in the world.... No need to explain or reform, just quack like the duck you know you are.

As a songwriter, I long ago abandoned the notion that I needed to write like Frank Loesser or Dave Frishberg, both true masters.... (Dave Frishberg has an eloquent word or two to say about Songwriting.)

In business as well as in life, the desire to mimic style seems imperative under the don't re-invent the wheel doctrine.

ProjectEthics

david@projectcommunity.com — 2008-10-16T10:17:12-07:00

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?)... Again.

If we do, indeed, actually live in a world where we are all connected and no one's in charge, what regulating force might we depend upon?... Our choices matter more simply because we are so tightly connected and because no one is in charge.

My mother, bless her heart, has lived her life trying to get away with something, anything. I think her great grandfather was ruined in one of the late-ninteenth century financial panics, and her family's language rails a lot about the plutocrats, those who lead simply because they are wealthy.... Always trying to get away with something, apparently for the simple joy of feeling in charge.

Her sense that she is not in charge seems to encourage some of her more irresponsible actions.... Later, we learn that some critical constituent has been carrying stones in his pocket ever since, and has positioned himself squarely between our imagined efficiency and our aspired-to goal, and we cannot get there from where we've innocently positioned ourselves and our misbegotten project.... Ethics are simply choices, well-informed or poorly informed makes all the difference in a world or a project where we're all connected and no one's ever really in charge.

Throw Out Da Bums!

david@projectcommunity.com — 2008-10-14T11:55:12-07:00

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.... Looking back (and then projecting forward), I can't see a single situation, other than that time when I decided to jump out of that tree onto a steep slope and cracked a metatarsal bone where, "We tried that once and it didn't work" actually worked. What worked, or seems to have worked so far, involved a lot of "We kept trying, even though it didn't work at first." Some stubborn someone wasting time, money, and reputation on what they (and perhaps no other at first) were convinced held some potential merit, until it did.... What if they are?

"It’s not only in the United States that the Depression-era tendency to “throw the bums out” looks like something less than a rational policy judgment.... In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher peddling a flighty share-the-wealth scheme, and the economy improved.... In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased went on to dominate politics for a decade or more thereafter.

Brush Up Your Shakespeare!

david@projectcommunity.com — 2008-10-07T21:56:41-07:00

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.

Of course, it's silly that merely reciting the Bard would make the difference our clients sought, but not knowing the Bard might well prevent the change we all aspired to.

We've all been subjected to the next best thing, delivered by someone clueless about the present history supporting everything.... Change, whatever its intent, needs to be melded with the familiar status quo if it is to be meaningful and successful.

So, the next time I (even you) intend to make something different, remember to brush up on whatever amounts to Shakespeare there first. As Virginia Satir said a very long time ago, "Change rests upon the full, albeit temporary acknowledgment of the way things are."