the merger and help us open them up.
That’s when I called in Think. They gave us a Strategic Project Manager and two full-time PMs as well as several others. Basically, they landed on us like the Marines storming a beach. What happened after that blew me away. We finished the merger before the three-month deadline and did it with elegance.
Seeing how they handled that dire situation, I learned how to modify my own approach to my teams. I placed less weight on certifications and more weight on the conduct of the individual. PMs who wanted to follow formulas simply for the sake of following formulas didn’t cut it anymore. Now I was looking for team members who understood what it meant to be in alignment with the company vision and mission. I wanted someone who knew the meaning of Business Value Potential and who had the courage speak out when they saw a block looming ahead.
I wanted someone who had more than simple technical know-how. I wanted someone who understood culture, who had a sense of what makes the key players tick, and who had some personal investment in the outcome. I wanted someone who could build a strategy based on solid principles, but with the flexibility to match the specific situation so we could make real progress that mattered.
Think changed my entire perspective on what effective project management entailed. However, at the same time I also realized that the amount of manpower and time they had invested in our company meant their process was not scalable. They’d have to train several teams filled with capable, savvy operators like Tony, Bryan, and others who were willing to work hard and long to get the job done.
Over the years since then, I’ve seen these brilliant professionals go through a maturing process. They actually cracked the code. Not only have they scaled their process, but they’ve broken the steps down into a readable, informative, and entertaining (albeit somewhat in-your-face) book.
Fasten your seatbelt. Things are about to get real when you dig into this stuff. These guys don’t mince words, and they don’t take prisoners. You’re gonna love ‘em.
John Camp
Technology Executive Advisor, former CTO of Bloomberg BNA, Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, Wolters Kluwer Health Division, and Sheshunoff Information Services, Thomson Financial Media Group
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to those who encourage us to question everything to get better at what we do! Without Lana McAra, our amazingly creative and talented collaborator and Ghost Writer, this book would otherwise be dry and poorly written in the voice of three guys in a Baltimore bar, telling stories about how our profession is like the movie Pulp Fiction. Lana is the best-selling, award-winning author of more than 20 titles and she’s a sought-after speaker. She made this book interesting and fun to write and generally tolerated our shenanigans.
Each of the coauthors have families and friends who allowed us to drone on endlessly about frameworks and observations shared in this book. They include wives, kids, mothers, fathers, best friends, and old and new acquaintances. Your kind smiles and attempts to really understand our world kept us moving forward.
Many thanks to those who edited, read, commented, criticized, admonished, laughed at, and sometimes agreed with the content in these pages. There are too many to name all, but a special thanks goes to present and past Think team members, Dale Matthews, John Camp, Dan Kuffer, Ed Mullin, Ed Hale, Scott Klinger, Erica McQuiston, Scott Sax, Kevin Palmer, Miguel Buddle, Katrina Kastendieck, Ben Adrian, Jewel Green, Andrew Mavronicolas, Rick Thomas, John Hill, Joe Miller, and Sharon Gibala-Marsh, and colleagues, Steve Jenkins, Professor Jim Kucher, Mike Karfakis (and the great team at Vitamin), Collin Cohen, Bill Collier, and Michael Dobson, and photographer Nick Gruebl, and proofreader Mary Coddington.
Finally, thank you to Morgan James Publishing for their support, coaching, and professionalism in bringing this book to market.
Inspired by the legend, Domine Quo Vadis.
PREFACE
2018 statistics show that Operations initiatives—for simplicity we call them projects—come to a less-than-desirable outcome 70% of the time.1 If you are an Operations Executive, at the end of a project you’re sure to wind up in front of a boardroom trying to come up with an explanation for what went wrong. If you’ve been in Operations for any time at all, you’ve been there more often than you’d like to think about. If you’re new to Operations, you’re on a slippery slope, my friend.
“Here lies the body of Mary Lee; died at the age of a hundred and three. For fifteen years she kept her virginity; not a bad record for this vicinity.”
– Captain Quint in Jaws98
Fortunately for you, you have an edge. You picked up this book. We’ve been managing operations for more than 16 years, and we refused to resign ourselves to failure more than two-thirds of the time.
The Matrix2
Starring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne Warner Bros Pictures (1999)
In The Matrix, Keanu Reeves plays a man leading a double life. By day he is a software developer, by night he is Neo, a high-level hacker. He receives a cryptic message on his computer screen from the legendary hacker named Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), followed by a knock on the door. Several people stand outside waiting to lead him to Morpheus.
Morpheus explains to Neo that humans exist in a false reality constructed to hide the truth. This false world is known as The Matrix. Everyone in The Matrix is a slave, sleepwalking through life, simply following the status quo with no hope for a better way, pawns to others with self-serving agendas.
Morpheus holds out his two hands. In each is a pill: in his left palm is a blue pill, in his right is a red pill. If Neo takes the blue pill, he will wake up in his bed and “believe whatever you want to believe.” But if he takes the red pill, his eyes will open. He’ll know what’s truly going on in the world.
Neo takes the red pill.
Immediately he sees the world in a completely different way. He asks Morpheus, “Can I go back?” to which Morpheus replies, “No.”
The red-pill blue-pill scene from The Matrix is a part of pop culture now. It represents the paradox of choice. If we choose to, we can see things differently, but we must make a conscious and deliberate choice. We took an honest look at the blue-pill Project Management model in today’s world and turned it inside out. We pulled off our gloves and got our hands dirty. We took the fight to the back lot. We kicked butt and took names. What we learned is radical, unsettling, and even scary for some.
This book is much more about effectiveness and how to achieve more of it than project management. Over the years, we formulated and refined our Red Pill model, chipping away at our own preconditioning and squashing our assumptions. Our goal: to determine how each company’s culture measures and cultivates effectiveness and how to reach the maximum velocity that culture will allow.
•We debunked mythologies.
•We moved the spotlight to what really matters.
•We measured twice and cut once.
•We deconstructed complicated systems and replaced them with simple principles.
•We reworked a stuffy, cumbersome model and transformed
