Conversations With Your Future Self

Two perspectives on dealing with the future, one more time management oriented, the other a little more creative.

Follow Up Then

Follow Up Then (thanks Marc) is a site that enables you to set time based reminder on email. It’s a clever idea and covers for times when you expect a response, but don’t get one, or simply want to send an email away for a while to deal with it later. The ingenuity of the system is that it all works from the address line of whatever email tool you use.

Future Me

Future Me which is much an art project as a tool also has an accompanying book. Has been used by people to write over a million letters to their future selves, about exam results, break ups, job searches etc. In addition to writing to yourself in the future, you can also read what others have written, here are some of the better ones.

Fixed vs. Growth Mindsets

Carol Dweck has great insights on psychology, which Michael Graham Richard summarizes here.

Essentially you can view intelligence as…

A. static

OR

B.something that can be trained and improved

If you are more inclined to chose answer B, you’ll be much more successful. Sure, you might worry you’ll fail more, but as Peter Drucker said, “Those who take risks typically fail about twice a year, and those who don’t take risks fail about twice a year.”

Michael Jordan Played The Wrong Sport

If asked to list the top athletes ever, Michael Jordan is a clear contender… as a basketball player.

However, his time switching from basketball to playing baseball at the top of his career after winning three NBA championships isn’t often discussed. Prompted by the tragic murder of his father (who once hoped he would play baseball rather than basketball) Michael Jordan quit basketball and played baseball in 1994 for a year for the Birmingham Barons, a Minor League Team that fed into the Chicago White Sox and his stats, as an outfielder though not stellar, were competitive, including 3 home runs.

So what, if anything, can be learned from this episode?

• Taking risks breeds success. Jordan was an exceptional athlete, but constantly looked to improve and wasn’t scared of failure. (It’s also telling that after switching to baseball, he went back to basketball and won another 3 championships)
• Just because you’re exceptionally good at something doesn’t make it consistently interesting.
• Skills are at least moderately transferable, Jordan had to work hard to train at baseball but was competitive within the Minor Leagues.

Psychopaths and Leadership

With the recent rape allegations around Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund. Jon Ronson’s book on psychopath’s is interesting, he finds that psychopaths are 4x more likely to be at the top of organizations than at the bottom. It’s interesting that some of the traits that can make you certifiably insane as described in Robert Hare’s psychopath test, can also help you rise to the top of organizations, such as a grandiose view of self worth or superficial charm.

You can take the psychopath test here (note – not entirely sure why the test is on a dating site, but it works) and Jon Ronson’s recent book on the topic is here.

The Value of Redundant Communication

A recent academic study has shown that project managers without direct (managerial) authority over project teams are more likely to use redundant communication to get their message across.

For example, they might use both an email and an IM to transmit the same message to the same person. The redundancy doesn’t necessarily achieve better results, but the work gets done faster. See the full article here.

Being Generous With The Credit

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” Harry S. Truman

What do you care more about: getting results or retaining ownership?

Characteristics of Great Projects

Professors Driv and Shenhar recently performed an analysis of what makes a great projects, which you can see here. Much of what they found is expected around culture, comprehensive planning, clear goals, and management support. However, although they identify a great project as creating something new, it was surprising how many of these projects leveraged ideas from other areas.

For example:

• Boeing 777 (pictured below) used custom software from Dassault Systems.
• World Trade Center used Italian technology to manage bedrock water levels.
• iPod/iTunes design used existing technology from Fuse/PortalPlayer.

This reinforces the idea that what is new is often a clever combination of existing ideas.

Better Communication As a Project Manager

Listen More – As a project manager, you don’t “know” the status of the project, you merely hear it from all those working it, record and playback a snapshot. If you’re not listening you won’t understand if anything important has changed. Any opportunity to communicate, is an opportunity to listen.

Talk Less – If your status report is over a page, it’s probably too long. Your goal is to know the detail of the project, but only so that you can simply it to its key components for your audience.

Know Your Audience – Everyone’s needs are unique. If you find you’re giving the same presentation to more than one group of people, then you’re probably not tailoring it enough.

A New Model for Risk/Return on Projects

In finance there is a concept called the Sharpe Ratio, which project management could learn from.

Basically a Sharpe Ratio captures return achieved in exchange for risk.

So it’s not just about how risky (delayed) a project but what what the true return is relative to that. This is not Return on Investment but Return on Risk.

Project management can’t achieve this level of accuracy because both return and risk are much harder to measure for a one off project than for an investment. For example, shares in Ford trade on the markets on a daily basis making it very easy to do complex statistical analysis. Project management is getting better in terms of Monte Carlo analysis to model schedule risk. But at a fundamental level the data project managers have to work with just is not as rich as in finance, because each project is unique.

The point is this, as I look at project failures, the most horrendously delayed projects are also often the ones that win major awards.

For example, would you rather have this on time and budget?

photo rytc (via Flickr)

Or these with delays and cost overruns, (but lots of awards)?

photo: Ian Kroll (via Flickr)

source: Anita363 (via Flickr)

Better Estimation – Looking Back To Look Forward

It should not be surprising that the best way to estimate how long something will take, is to understand how long it took last time. In many cases this data is not hard to find, even though the project might be new, many of the tasks within it are not.

So how do you do your estimates? Do you start with a blank page, or look back at your last project?