Laura K

An intertesting read with some real gems in it.

Reviewed: 07-09-19

This book was a fascinating read. The book contained a wealth of good information and useful techniques for navigating the thorny road of change management and future focus within a company, a few key ideas leapt out at me as being vital to keep in mind and particularly relevant for my role as a PM.

The value of identifying and nurturing “Sparks” within your team or organization. Those individuals who can imagine future improvements to the organization or project. The value of these individuals cannot be overstated, and if you find a good one it’s well worth it to nurture them and to help them keep the faith.

The encouragement to continually revise your pitch and engagement strategy, to always adapt your message appropriately to an audience. The ability to simplify and Reframe is a valuable skill for a PM to develop and can make the difference between running a successful project and stakeholders becoming dissatisfied or hostile to your progress. Keep telling the story until everyone knows it.

Finding ways to actively recruit and weaponize the gatekeepers within your company to improve the overall health of your project. I’ve run many projects over the years and by far the worst experience is when you have people who are simply naysaying and telling you why it can’t be done without offering anything in return. Someone standing in your way for no reason other than “We’ve always done it this way” offers nothing to you or the company. If you can turn them into someone who has a stake in your operation and a legitimate critique that lets you make your project better everyone wins.

The 1% improvement analysis section actually blew my mind. I’m a big fan of process improvements and making things better and more efficient. However, it’s very difficult to justify a lot of work over such small, incremental improvements. Unless you can bring the analytics in house and start putting numbers onto the smallest easy to understand improvement metric, you might be left in the cold for process improvements.

While the advice was generally compelling, one aspect I found truly interesting, and would have liked to have read more of, was the cognitive dissonance and resistance that the mere idea of change can provoke in an organization. A peek into the strain and dysfunction that a desire to innovate and stay relevant causes at an organization as entrenched as GE was fascinating to read about. The author was engaged in one of the world’s largest corporations for many formative years leading up until now, and It was a fascinating look at corporate culture at that time being forced to evolve with the times.

All in all I’m glad I read this book. It offered a different perspective on the corporate world than I typically hold and helped to put some higher-level decisions in context for me, which will let me appreciate the logic behind them when they happen within my organization.

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