All Posts in Project Management

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Metaphors can’t prove a point but they’re terrific ways to illustrate them.

Take project management. Some projects are voyages of discovery (imagine Magellan, consulting a Gantt chart and holding weekly status meetings while circumnavigating the earth). At the other extreme are projects more like assembling a model airplane, where a finite, enumerated list of tasks in a specific sequence makes all kinds of sense.

In between are projects with similarities to painting (a canvas, not a wall), and others that are like making a movie.

Hmmm. Making a movie. I have a source for that. Meet the Godfather of Gore … the co-inventor of the splatter movie and reason why, in high school, my summer jobs were so much odder than anyone else’s, Herschell Gordon Lewis (aka Dear Ol’ Dad).

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Talk about tough-to-cross chasms …

“How Great Entrepreneurs Think,” (Leigh Buchanan, Inc., 2/1/2011) describes seriously interesting research by Saras Sarasvathy on the difference between entrepreneurs and corporate managers.

Unlike the usual takes on the subject (this old column, for example), Sarasvathy spent hours with a statistically significant number of both in the context of solving typical business problems, comparing their verbalized thought processes to identify the differences.

Her conclusion: Entrepreneurs are “Iron Chefs” — improvisers who figure out how to make something terrific out of whatever is available at the moment. They “… constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies.”

Corporate managers, in contrast, are far more analytical. They start by defining goals, “planning the work and working the plan” to achieve them.

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