If something is for sure in this book, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t predict what’s coming next. I mean, I suppose if you kidnap someone you don’t go ahead and take his entire house furniture so he wakes up in his own bed. But again in this book kidnapping is the new hiring so not much has to make sense.
- “Mr.Tompkins considered. “What’s the job?” he said at last. She batted her eyelashes at him becomingly. “I thought you’d never ask.” “
Something I have always found worrying is the fact that must people look for a job with money as the most important aspect, and I know it sounds silly because the world is all about money, but I feel many people forget what, for me, is crucial in a job: it HAS to be something I enjoy. Of course a good pay is great!, But if I’m not passionate at what I do I won’t get good at it, and the reason is simple, practice makes perfect and without passion you won’t practice.
I learned a lot by paying attention to all the questions Tom asks Lahksa about the job’s environment. First things first: communication is key, he wants all his employees in the same place and all of them able to communicate fluently in English with him and with all the right tools and up to date systems, he also wants to bring people he knows will do a great job working for him, and to be able to do that in a job must be awesome as you don’t have to deal with finding the perfect co-workers again.
With the start of the control experiment idea I see what Tom DeMarco meant at the preface of the book when talking about the quantum physics book he read, the story takes the perfect situations to explain project management principles with unrealistic situations that make the lessons as clear as possible. And I mean unrealistic because how often do you get all the engineers in a city available to all repeat the same project.
A few years ago I would’ve thought chapter 4’s topic was silly, how could someone don’t act on something and rather let other areas problems go by than try fixing something by taking responsibility for it. But having two older brothers who are business administrators helps with this kind of topic, and with their experiences I learned that it is something that happens a lot. Fear of taking responsibility of actions is actually one of the main things that separates creative leaders from workers that will only follow the rules, and this afraid workers will truly make the biggest mistake by trying to avoid them instead of aiming for greatness. Of course it’s not about being fearless but knowing what responsibilities mean and knowing how to handle them.
Later on you get to meet the source of the negative reinforcement that made people afraid of acting in chapter 4. NNL (AKA Bill Gates) was not the tyrant I expected, honestly with how the book was turning I was expecting a tyrant that anyone should be afraid of, but it was a boss trying desperately to finally get someone to get their job done on time (more accurately on Bill’s time). If you get the chance of watching Bill Gates documentary on Netflix ‘Inside bill’s brain’, you won’t regret it. It’s super interesting to see his personality and what he does every day to get better, if reading were a sport, he would be the one of the best at it no doubt.
Project Evaluation and Management Blog 