Maybe the worst result of a failed project is rebeginning the same. Going back to the starting line.

Post failure, starting line seems like an infelicitous target. Very remote. Apparently.

Think: if you’ve failed, if you’ve traveled the wrong path, does it make sense to keep chasing something down the wrong path? Isn’t the logical step is to go back to the starting line and start running your race again?

Beginning is good. Rebeginning is wiser. At least, it has one less chance to fail.

Love the staring line. It’s fancier than you thought.

See Also:

1. Leading Beyond Your Title Sometimes Means: 15
2. 9 Rock Solid Thoughts You May Love To Revisit From #3Idiot (’s) Perspective
3. Walking matters, Direction matters more.
4. You Can Learn Even from a Funny SMS You Get
5. You Don’t Need Your Own Business to Become an Entrepreneur

1. Leading Beyond Your Title Sometimes Means: 15
2. 9 Rock Solid Thoughts You May Love To Revisit From #3Idiot (’s) Perspective
3. Walking matters, Direction matters more.
4. You Can Learn Even from a Funny SMS You Get
5. You Don’t Need Your Own Business to Become an Entrepreneur

Most projects don’t collapse sensationally.

They collapse slowly.

But you wouldn’t know that for sitting in at steering meetings or reading monthly project status reports.

Same way, businesses, countries and families collapse. Slowly.

Good and bad thing about this is: It involves people. Most people have tendency to respond to urgency. People take  massive actions only when encountered with an urgency.

If we change our learning systems, perhaps, people’s tendencies can be altered to respond to important stuff instead. But, I’m not sure when.

To combat with such slow collapsing, most project managers take an unsubtle, wider shot: A team revamping program or totally redesigned collaboration software.

The solution, more probably than not, is to consistently stop the slippage. To continuously improve the uninteresting stuff (e.g. how people respond to newly discovered information in project discussions and how they can do it even better).

Projects fail slowly. Success might come faster, though. That’s where the role of a dependable project manager comes in.

That role is beyond the classic definition of the project management. Person in this role  ‘leads’ the project, not just manages it.

And one of the most important activity of ‘leading’ a project is to prevent a slow collapse by getting into the vertical depth of the matters and do everything possible to get every small thing right. Easier said than done.

See Also:

1. Dependable Project Manager 9
2. I’m not a project manager. Why do I need to learn project management?
3. Project Environment Analysis 8
4. What Every Project Manager Wants to Know About Vacation-Planning?
5. If You Want to Have a Great Project Team

1. Dependable Project Manager 9
2. I’m not a project manager. Why do I need to learn project management?
3. Project Environment Analysis 8
4. What Every Project Manager Wants to Know About Vacation-Planning?
5. If You Want to Have a Great Project Team

1. Glamorous, in the beginning;
2. Hard (in fact, very hard), soon after;
3. Needs a groundbreaker (pioneer, go getter, fireball kind of) mindset;
4. Not for you if you:
5. …get disturbed by things you cannot control in your job;
6. …need very clear objectives from your management to perform;
7. …need very co-operative people to get things done;
8. …always need someone to listen to your complaints. Ah…you complain??
9. …are reasonable, well at least 90 percent;
10. …think one has to lose in order for the other to win;
11. …think that honesty was the best policy in 20^th century, maybe. This is 21^st – isn’t it?
12. …think you need a perfect plan to get started (does perfection exist? Where?);
13. Sure for you if you:
14. …don’t depend on your MBA degree to take decisions;
15. …lead beyond your title to get things done, always;
16. …want to take the pain of making the road;
17. …know that someone else is going to travel that road later, but anyways;
18. …don’t complain. About the dust. About bad people. About crazy clients. about anyone;
19. …take responsibility for the problems created by other people;
20. …have persistent determination; a completely different level of commitment;
21. …listen to criticism about what you do; look at the things from multiple perspectives but still move ahead;
22. …think you’re smart – you always learn from everyone’s (mostly others’) mistakes;  not necessarily your own;
23. …understand multiple contexts well; better if you apply lessons learned in one into the other;
24. …believe in creating win-win business prepositions (Haven’t read 7 Habits from Stephen Covey? Huh?);
25. …are a (the best) people magnet – someone said ‘like attracts like’ …isn’t it? Are you?
26. …are unreasonable;
27. …begin with the end in mind (Covey, again) but having (smart) goals is must;
28. …understand what ‘empathy’ means. It means: how people feel about things. It leads from hiring right person to producing great products to selling not so great products what you wanted to. Not so easy but simple.
29. …enjoy reading (and acting upon, most important!) what Jobs or Seth or Bate have to say.
30. …start something, right now!

See Also:

1. Prevent Your Project from Collapsing

1. Prevent Your Project from Collapsing

A zero-conflict workplace is like living in fool’s paradise and wiser is one who is able to make profit even from the conflicts.
To do that, your primary focus should be on how to prevent it. Once, Max Lucade wrote,

“Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional.”

So prevent it. Here are some tips:

1. Have people with integrity on board: Make sure your people have integrity and character.  Team is not a team but just a group of people if team members cannot trust one another.  Remember, trust without integrity is just not possible.
2. Invest in developing listening skill: Make sure they possess good listening skills. If you recognize that some people lack such a skill, work on it. State clearly what specific steps they need to take in order to develop listening skills. For example, encouraging them to attend Landmark Forum could be a good option.
3. Have them read the One Minute Manager: Make sure that they have not only read The One Minute Manager, they really understand it from its deepest insights. Remember, we are just not an individual but an individual managing our own behavior – and this book focuses on some of the most powerful management principles.
4. Don’t accept anything but solution focused approach: Many people have a habit to complain or criticize about something. That’s okay when they also come with the possible solutions. In fact, a problem presented with a possible solution is a key weapon in grinding success faster. Encourage people to look at problems as opportunities to go to the next level.
5. Encourage Life-long relationships: Make sure your team members have nurtured internal relationships which are going to stay alive for their remaining life. Situational leadership is good not situational relationships.
6. Develop tools to pre-handle conflicts: Invest in developing tools and techniques which handle conflicts even before that happen. For example, you can have a list of the causes of conflicts or invest in team-training where team members are taught how to self-handle conflicts etc.
7. Choose leadership over bossism: Choose to be a leader over just being a boss. E.m Kelly said, “The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, ‘Go!’ while a leader says, ‘Let’s go!’.” Leader leads regardless of a title and takes accountability for what his people are doing. He leads from the front and makes optimum use of techniques like Responsibility assignment (RACI) metrics to prevent conflicts.

If prevention doesn’t work and still you find yourself in the middle of a conflict, next best thing is to systematically attack the problem, resolve it, record the lessons learned and prevent it the next time. Here’s how:

1. Develop Problem Charter: Understand the problem very precisely. Go to the maximum possible detail level and get the clarity. Develop a problem charter which clearly states Who, What, Why, When Where and How of a problem.
2. Develop a plan: Develop a plan which clearly states how you will perform steps to overcome a problem.  Meet the entities identified in the first step, collect other relevant information, keep alternatives ready and be ready to attack the problem.
3. Execute: Now you have two good things. Necessary clarity about what the problem is and one or more ways about how you will act on it. So execute. Call meetings, exhibit different situational leadership styles and management practices.
4. Evaluate the outcomes: Captivation of execution is such that the executor forgets to pause and think about how he is executing. So monitor and control your execution. If you feel that your execution needs to be altered, do that. Nothing is permanent and ‘execution’ should also not be an exception. If needs be, restart from step 2 and refine the plan.
5. Close the problem: Once planned outcome has come, close the problem. Make all the required people aware about the updated status of the problem and record the lessons learned.

You don’t need to always formally develop problem charter or a plan but you need to do that process mentally in order to execute from the correct context.

So profit from it. Like a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung said,

“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.”

See Also:

1. Do You Want to Win the Battle or the War?
2. Prevent Your Project from Collapsing
3. If You Want to Have a Great Project Team
4. Stop Being A Hero
5. Seven Habits Of Highly Ineffective People

1. Do You Want to Win the Battle or the War?
2. Prevent Your Project from Collapsing
3. If You Want to Have a Great Project Team
4. Stop Being A Hero
5. Seven Habits Of Highly Ineffective People

To live a richer, more meaningful life, you need to become a source of thoughts and actions which provide meaning to your life. You cannot take control of your life just by following others. Instead, you need to play your own game.

Perhaps most of us know that, but in practice it’s not commonly seen.  You surrender to the customs of the family, workplace or society at the cost of your singularity and start doing things which nobody cares about. Or you feel like being caught in an Unconstructed Action Space.

(Photo Credit: Bill Ward’s Brickpile)

A common pattern of world’s most successful people is not to worry about what other people think of them.  M K Gandhi didn’t worry, Nelson Mandela didn’t worry, Bill Gates didn’t worry or Steve Jobs didn’t worry. Instead, they played their own game powered by their own instincts; took the road less traveled and created the history.

So today is a good time to pause and think about it. Reconsider how you operate. Are you doing some things just because everyone else is doing?

Observe your daily routine. Right from the time your day starts to the time your day ends.  Take a stock of all of your routine actions. Are all of your actions your conscious choices? Or there are some actions you take just because your family, friends, neighbors or colleagues take.

Consider what Caryl P. Haskins quoted,

“It is the gifted, unorthodox individual, in the laboratory, or the study, or the walk by the river at twilight, who has always brought to us, and must continue to bring to us, all the basic resources by which we live.”

And Robin Sharma looked at the same from different perspective,

“If you follow the crowd, the place you will most likely end up at is the exit.”

It is up to you to decide whether you want to follow the crowd and make sure you’ll end up at a known exit point or you want to construct something which has never before constructed and leave a trail.

Many people underestimate the essence of the right focus. They don’t even try to. Eventually, they live life full of unhappiness, sorrow and grief because of their unfocused actions (or non-actions.)

Photo Credit: R'eyes' Flickr photostream

Essence of Focus

Rick and Peter were colleagues in a dying company.

Peter focused on his extra-marital affair. Rick focused on finding another job. Rick found one, Peter got fired.

Peter took few thousands loan from Rick.

9 months later:

Jobless Peter is hiding from Rick who is now reluctant to help colleagues.

See Also:

1. Mini Saga – Decision Making
2. Mini Saga – Executing The Dream
3. Mini Saga – Lights, Camera…Action!
4. Mini Saga – Doing Rather Than Being
5. Mini Saga – Limitationless Elisha (And The World, Too!)

1. Mini Saga – Decision Making
2. Mini Saga – Executing The Dream
3. Mini Saga – Lights, Camera…Action!
4. Mini Saga – Doing Rather Than Being
5. Mini Saga – Limitationless Elisha (And The World, Too!)

In today’s economy, many organization cultures suck and many managers perceive the dream of having their own startup just because of that.

Nothing is wrong in that however they must know that they cannot underestimate the need of planning; analyzing and quantifying all the possible outcomes of their actions.

Photo Credit: i dont make art anymore's Flickr photostream

Dream full of passion, execution full of faults.

Peter had a dream to create a unique business.

He found an old friend who wanted to invest little thousand dollars. Peter believed more in passion than in planning.

He did not think about any exit strategy.

Peter is in debt and finding a job for last 3 months. Sigh.

See Also:

1. Mini Saga – Focus
2. Mini Saga – Lights, Camera…Action!
3. Mini Saga – Decision Making
4. Mini Saga – Reward (Or do you feel like being squeezed?)
5. Mini Saga – Secured UnSuccess!

1. Mini Saga – Focus
2. Mini Saga – Lights, Camera…Action!
3. Mini Saga – Decision Making
4. Mini Saga – Reward (Or do you feel like being squeezed?)
5. Mini Saga – Secured UnSuccess!