Category: Books/Reviews

I’ve taught project management for the last six years. I’ve been a project manager in one way or another for over fifty. I’m somewhere better than average but nowhere near the best project managers I’ve known and worked with.

If I were to teach the subject again, How Big Things Get Done would be required reading. Very little of it is about the tools and techniques that occupy the standard texts. Looking instead at success and failures in well-known, large-scale projects, Flyvbjerg and Gardner provide insight into how to navigate the organizational and political contexts that surround any effort to create something new and consequential.

While it can be more fun to read about the failures, the deeper lessons fall out of understanding how the successes happened. The lessons aren’t hugely surprising;

• Time invested in planning is a lot cheaper and more effective than rushing into doing.
• Going with a proven team eliminates many risks and sets you up to handle the risks you can’t dodge.
• Iteration is your friend. Never depend on getting it right the first time.

The hardest part of their approach is the search for modularity; to find the basic building block that you can organize the effort and the plan around. Their closing chapter is titled “What’s Your Lego?”. Here’s their closing bit of advice:

Get a small thing, a basic building block. Combine it with another and another until you have what you need. That’s how a single solar cell becomes a solar panel, which becomes a solar array, which becomes a massive megawatt-churning solar farm. Modularity delivers faster, cheaper, and better, making it valuable for all project types and sizes. But for building at a truly huge scale—the scale that transforms cities, countries, even the world—modularity is not just valuable, it’s indispensable.

If projects are part of your portfolio, How Big Things Get Done belongs on your reading list.

I’m a product of the case method approach to an MBA. After two years of analyzing three cases a day, I then spent time as a case writer. One of the first questions you would always face was “have you run the numbers?”

Figuring out which numbers you should run and what the heck “running the numbers” was supposed to mean was all part of the learning process.

Vaclav Smil’s most recent book, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going provides an excellent example of the power of this strategy. It also offers a flavor of the experience I encountered too often when I faced a professor without running the numbers first. Here’s Smil’s motivation for this book:

The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas and proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities.

Smil lays out his case for the relevant information about the real world that we ought to share. He starts with energy and food. Hard to get much more fundamental than that. If you’ve got eight billion people on the planet, that’s going to call for a lot of food to produce and distribute. That production and distribution depends on energy and most of that energy comes from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels that won’t be easily displaced by renewable sources at the scale implied by a population of eight billion.

This is a theme that Smil continues to hammer on; that you have to look at systems and scale in sync. He drives that home in a series of chapters examining his candidates for the four material systems that underpin our current economic environment; steel, cement, plastics, and ammonia. Not exactly the “software is eating the world” message that we’ve become accustomed to.

Smil stops short of offering specific policy recommendations. His desire is to see policy debates grounded in a better understanding of the relevant underlying systems and their scale. He hints at options that he deems plausible;

Solutions, adjustments, and adaptations are available. Affluent countries could reduce their average per capita energy use by large margins and still retain a comfortable quality of life. Widespread diffusion of simple technical fixes ranging from mandated triple windows to designs of more durable vehicles would have significant cumulative effects. The halving of food waste and changing the composition of global meat consumption would reduce carbon emissions without degrading the quality of food supply. Remarkably, these measures are absent, or rank low, in typical recitals of coming low-carbon “revolutions” that rely on as-yet-unavailable mass-scale electricity storage or on the promise of unrealistically massive carbon capture and its permanent storage underground.
…
The reality is that any sufficiently effective steps will be decidedly non-magical, gradual, and costly.

This is a book that should be widely read. What it needs is a companion volume that delves into the human systems side of how we might go about tying the politics of large scale system change with a grounded acceptance of the facts on the ground.

 

A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the World We Can Proudly Leave Our Kids by 2050. Chunka Mui, Paul Carroll, and Tim Andrews. 

Full disclosure, I’ve known and worked with the authors for over twenty five years. I’m biased. Largely because I have first hand knowledge of how smart they are and how deeply they think. 

In A Brief History of a Perfect Future, they take an old observation of Alan Kay’s–“the best way to predict the future is to invent it”–and turn that into a planning process you can apply yourself. 

When the goal is invention not prediction, you want to understand what you have to work with. You’d like to work with what is cheap and readily available. Today, computing power qualifies. Thirty years ago that wasn’t the case. Fortunes were made by those who recognized that trend and acted accordingly.  We’re still learning how to think about what’s possible with essentially free computation. 

Mui, Carroll, and Andrews extend that line of thinking into seven “Laws of Zero,” These are factors of production on similar improvement paths; computation, communication, information, genomics, energy, water, and transportation. What becomes possible when you can anticipate thousand and million-fold improvements in price and performance in any one of these elements? When they improve in concert? 

The authors play out potential scenarios in the next section of the book. What futures might we invent for ourselves? None are foreordained. None are impossible. The scenarios provided here are provocative and plausible. 

The point, of course, is not whether these particular futures come to pass. We’re not running a race on a fixed track. We’re building new roads to new destinations. Much more fun and rewarding than chasing someone else on their road. These are traveling companions worth getting to know.

One of my bad habits is obsessing about my deficiency of good habits. I know that good habits are important because the nuns and monks were relentless in telling me so; decades later their ambivalence about my academic success without suitable discipline still lingers.

I’m not devoid of good habits. Lately, I’ve had some success with Jerry Seinfeld’s keep the streak going/don’t break the chain trick (Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret), although Friday’s NY Times Crossword stumped me, breaking a 355-day streak. Two and a quarter years ago, I managed to reboot a journaling habit by starting a Morning Pages effort. 

Habits are on my mind lately for several reasons. Back in March, I finished Wendy Wood‘s Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick and thought it worth processing my thoughts into a post here. A bit slower than I would like, but not unusually so. 

More recently, I came across an interesting blog post from Eleanor Konik, The Difficulties of Teaching Notetaking » Eleanor Konik. I’ve been chipping away at improving my own note-taking practices and was toying with how and whether to incorporate any of that into my teaching. Konik’s argument is that no one implements good techniques simply because they’re good techniques. We’re all adept at cost/benefit calculations and the payoff structures for most “good” habits are hugely dependent on how heavily you weight the suasion of authority figures. For most of us, most of the time, the payoff for following objectively good practices doesn’t rise to the effort. 

This is where the accumulating research on habit formation comes in. Converting an activity from an invocation of willpower to automatic pilot effectively eliminates the effort and energy part of the equation. This is why Alfred North Whitehead’s observation continues to show up in discussions of habit:

 Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. 

We know that thinking is expensive. As knowledge workers, thinking is a definitional component of your work. One of the highest returns on IQ points is reducing the demand for IQ points wherever possible. 

Woods offers an observation that I’ll close with; 

we repeatedly do the things we love doing. But we also grow to love the things that we repeatedly do.

The task then is to be more intentional about the practices whose repetition will lay down the habits that will free up the capacity for better “operations of thought” when those decisive moments arrive.

Review: Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life

I think my father made decent money, although I don’t have any concrete numbers. But, if you have seven children to feed, clothe, and educate stretching every dollar is sound practice. My mother did this with sometimes frightening skill. She would drive out of her way to save a few pennies per gallon on gasoline or milk, both of which we consumed in prodigious quantities. Frugal was a badge of honor. Mom lived “time is money” more than any business school professor I ever met. It was a source of friction between us from time to time.

Ashley Whillans is a Harvard Business School professor whose research makes the case that we have that mantra inverted; “money is time.” But, unlike a mathematical inversion, the direction you adopt makes a difference. Whillans research investigates the trouble we get into by accepting the conventional wisdom. That leads to solid advice on how to shift your perspective to prioritizing time over money in spite of the pressures to do the opposite. Appropriately enough, Whillans manages to compress all of the argument and advice into a compact package respectful of and worth your time. 

Wambach, Abby. 2019. WOLFPACK: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game. Celadon Books.

I am not the ostensible target audience for this book. Abby Wambach, one of the all-time best soccer players in the world, wrote Wolfpack following her commencement address at Barnard College in 2018;

She’s talking to women about leadership.

But I would be stupid not to take advantage of wisdom wherever I find it. I stumbled across Wolfpack courtesy of Brené Brown ([Brené with Abby Wambach on the New Rules of Leadership) who puts it on her “top five must-read leadership books.” She’s right.

Wolfpack is a short book. That’s because there isn’t any padding. The book resembles the game Wambach played; competition and cooperation stripped to its essentials.

She draws her title from the tale of how the re-introduction of wolves restored the ecosystem of Yellowstone Park. It’s a story about the complexity and simplicity of systems. I’ve written about it myself before; (Learning to see systems \- wolves and rivers). It’s worth your time to check that story out;

Wambach packages her advice in a handful of rules. One that stood out for me was “lead from the bench.” Perhaps it resonates with my experience as a stage manager operating in the wings. While I’ve had my share of leading from in front, I’ve seen the power of leading from wherever circumstances have put you. Wambach’s particular story stems from her transition from starter to substitute during the 2015 World Cup competition. Here’s her take on that moment:

You are allowed to be disappointed when it feels like life’s benched you. What you aren’t allowed to do is miss your opportunity to lead from the bench. If you’re not a leader on the bench, don’t call yourself a leader on the field. You’re either a leader everywhere or nowhere.

Wambach understands that leadership isn’t about the individual. One powerful statement of that level of insight shows up in this TV commercial with her;

One more quote from Wambach;

Leadership is not a position to earn, it’s an inherent power to claim. Leadership is the blood that runs through your veins—it’s born in you. It’s not the privilege of a few, it is the right and responsibility of all. Leader is not a title that the world gives to you—it’s an offering that you give to the world.

This is leadership worth emulating.

MacKenzie, Gordon. 1997. Orbiting the Giant Hairball : A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving With Grace. US: Viking Pr.

I first encountered Gordon MacKenzie’s Orbiting the Giant Hairball during my time growing Diamond Technology Partners. I decided to revisit it recently. I’ve picked it up from time to time over the intervening 23 years (we’ll return to that notion in a bit). It wasn’t something that neatly fit my typical reading patterns. But it deals with a problem that has been central to my work. How do you reconcile creativity and organizations?

Maybe it was the image of large organizations as “hairballs.” MacKenzie’s point about larger organizations was that they accrete rules and standard operating procedures over time. Mostly, that is a good and necessary thing. You don’t want every worker on the line to decide which tires to attach to the axles today. But if you spend much time inside organizations, you learn that rules and rule-making can impose their own perverse logic. How many items in the standard operating procedures or the employee manual reduce to “never, ever, let Joe do that again?” Organizations are suspicious of creativity and people are full of it. A volatile combination.

MacKenzie worked inside Hallmark; he was a creative leader in an organization that depended on its creativity. Even there, the forces working to suppress creativity were powerful. MacKenzie puts it succinctly, ” it is not the business of authority figures to validate genius, because genius threatens authority.” His solution as he gained authority within Hallmark was appropriately creative. Genius is hard to discern before the fact. MacKenzie’s answer was to default to saying “yes.” If someone or some team approached MacKenzie with a proposal to try something, he gave them permission. He didn’t ask or worry whether he had any authority to do so. This mildly subversive act was often just enough to shake loose resources or convince others to let an experiment proceed. I adopted this strategy to good effect.

Fundamentally, Orbiting the Giant Hairball is about this tension between order and chaos. The proponents of order are loud and powerful. But the world depends on the balance between yin and yang. There are more than enough forces working against creativity in organizations; the creative spirit needs champions too.

One final observation. I pointed out at the start that I had elected to reread this provocative little book, Lately, I’ve been encountering a lot of well-argued, and certainly well-intentioned, advice about the importance of improving efficiency in processing new information. We’re assaulted with new inputs. But efficiency is the wrong metric. Managing inputs effectively should dominate efficiency. But effectiveness is much harder to assess. Many items on my reading list are worth no more than a single reading; some turn out to not be worth that. But the other tail of the distribution also matters. Certain books yield new insights when you revisit them with further experience. Don’t let a quest for temporary efficiencies block access to that additional value.

Morville, Peter. 2014. Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything. US: Semantic Studios.

Intertwingled is not a practical book. It is not intended to be. Unfortunately, that will discourage those who could most benefit from its message and perspective. It’s an extended reflection by its author, Peter Morville, on the deep challenges of making information more easily accessible and impactful within organizations. Morville has written several of the essential books in the world of information design and architecture (Information Architecture,  Ambient Findability). Intertwingled is a more reflective exercise; an attempt to pick a broader vantage point on understanding both the technological and organizational environments we inhabit. Morville opens with an observation from Ted Nelson:

People keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.  – Theodor Holm Nelson

I’ve never been a huge fan of the term “intertwingled” – probably because I am generally suspicious of coining “cute” new terms. Ted Nelson, on the other hand, seems drawn to the practice. Nelson’s books, Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines, were hugely influential in luring me into the field and Morville seems to have been similarly enticed.

I don’t think Morville makes me any more comfortable with the term, but the book and his arguments and observations are still  worth the time.

It’s beyond cliche that we live in an information economy. It’s easy to be distracted by the shiny stuff– apps, devices,  platforms, technology. Morville’s focus is on the peculiar notion of information. Information is a surprisingly slippery term and we are all well served by efforts such as Intertwingled that make us think about that slipperiness. Morville observes that

Access to massive amounts of conflicting information from myriad sources creates filter failure. We don’t know what to believe. So we fall back on simple ways of knowing. We trust experts and those in authority. We follow doctor’s orders. Or we reject expertise completely.

Lately, it seems that rejection has become the go to strategy in many settings. This is not, in fact, a new problem. Morville, for example, offers the following observation from computer scientist Calvin Mooers published in 1959:

Many people may not want information, and they will avoid using a system precisely because it gives them information. Having information is painful and troublesome. We have all experienced this. If you have information, you must first read it, which is not always easy. You must then try to understand it. Understanding the information may show that your work was wrong, or may show that your work was needless. Thus not having and not using information can often lead to less trouble and pain.

Morville’s goal with Intertwingled is to make you think. He succeeds admirably. Enough so that this will be a book I expect to return to.