Art Petty on Management

It's Time to Recognize the Project Manager as a Leader

The most challenging leadership positions are the informal roles where an individual leads based on his or her credibility and capability without the backing of a formal reporting structure.  These positions are often characterized by a high-level or responsibility for results with little direct authority over the people doing the work.  The role of Project Manager matches this description perfectly, with organizations increasingly looking to the individuals charged with project or program management to play key roles in executing on strategic priorities. 

Unfortunately, in many organizations, the role of Project Manager is inappropriately disconnected from the strategy process and is often viewed and treated by executives as a mid-level or administrative role.  This is wrong.  Senior executives would be wise to tap into the unique skills, insights and capabilities of the best Project Managers as they look to build out their leadership teams and to propel their organizations faster.

How do Ideas Turn Into Actions in Your Firm? Hint: Check Your Leadership Culture

Seriously.  If you are at or near the top of the food chain in your organization, this is one of those perplexing questions that can have you staring at the ceiling at two in the morning, asking yourself, "Yeah, how do insights and ideas turn into actions in our business?"  and "Who is really responsible for new ideas here?" 

This is a particularly bothersome issue if you are thinking in terms of strategy and wanting to make certain that profound insights and ideas gained in the market are turned into actions that create value for your stakeholders. 

Stress at Work, Great Leadership Practices and Ignoring Bad Advice

Every once in awhile, a number of articles or blog posts converge nicely to build on each other.  Today over at Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Blog in his post entitled Sunday Afternoons, Wally offers his perspective on an article describing that many people report feeling a high degree of anxiety about work as Monday looms in the foreground.  Wally's guidance for the leader's role in helping eradicate the causes of this unproductive stress is priceless and timeless (go ahead and click over and read it) and it puts the exclamation point on the leadership themes found in several other recent articles and posts.

Improve Managerial Effectiveness by Broadening Span of Control?

There's a great, thought-provoking article today in the March 24, 2008 Wall Street Journal. by George Anders, entitled: Overseeing More Employees with Fewer Managers.  The sub-title of the article identifies the source of this so-called trend: Consultants Are Urging Companies to Loosen Their Supervising Views.

Want to Change? Manage Strategy in Bursts!

Traditional strategic planning approaches often fail to deliver the results that firms require to jump start growth or pull out of a sustained decline.  Legacy approaches emphasize a periodic focus on strategy—often an annual refresh against a long-range plan.  This “strategy as an event” approach is increasingly obsolete in a world that changes overnight, with markets being born, maturing and dying at hyper-speed.  Instead, what is needed is a more dynamic means for professionals to experiment, innovate and to assess results and refine activities in near-real time.

Organizations that learn to work in “Strategy Bursts” are able to learn, adapt and refine their strategic activities faster than more plodding competitors, but this new style requires learning and internalizing a new approach to strategy management and execution.  For many leaders and executives, succeeding with this new model requires letting go of old strategy habits and biases. 

The Meeting is Never for Decision-Making: A Product Management Lesson I Learned at Matsushita

I will be posting from airport lounges this week, but before I head out, I wanted to relate a lesson about decision-making that I learned (the hard way) a number of years ago.  This was prompted by a discussion with a promising early career product management professional, "Bob," that had expressed frustration at the way decisions were reached in his company. I think that the lesson still holds today.

Improving The Executive and Project Manager Relationship

I've recently become immersed in developing a much better understanding of the role, challenges and contributions of Project Management to an organization's success, and I cringe when recalling the many examples I observed of executives strong-arming the project process to fit their objectives.  In the spirit of candor, I recall one or two instances where I might have asserted executive will to try and change the forces of the universe and get a new product out the door faster than my project manager said was humanly possible.  I also recall that the Project Manager ended up being right.

As professional project management practices (and project managers) grow in importance to a firm's success (see my post: Struggling With Strategy? Think Project Management), it is critical that top leaders learn how to support the process rather than beat it into submission.  And because as the saying goes, "it takes two to tango," Project Managers need to learn how to "manage" their executives to minimize unproductive involvement or outright interference. 

Struggling with Strategy? Think Project Management!

Note: With this post, I am adding the category of Project Management to my areas of coverage.

Most organizations struggle with strategy.  It’s hard work, it requires a lot of cooperation across functions and it takes incredible discipline to implement, monitor and adapt.  Strategy is particularly difficult for firms that are embarking on a formalized initiative for the first time—often, smaller firms striving to grow or established firms seeking to diversify. 

Strategy is a healthy mix of art and science.  Unfortunately, too many organizations approach strategy as if were alchemy.  Adding formal project management practices to the strategy program increases the “science” component and improves a firm’s chances of success for a successful initiative as well as for sustaining of an on-going, healthy program.   

Grace Under Pressure: A Great Leadership Opportunity

In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm currently off on a holiday with my oldest son.  We escaped the frozen, snow covered Midwest for some sun and fun.  We attended the finals of a tennis tournament yesterday, played a few hours of tennis today and got a bit too much sun.  Tomorrow we are off on a mountain hiking adventure.  Great time together with my son and my brother and his family.

Unfortunately, our home away from home has internet connectivity, so while my 19 year old is napping after beating up on me on the tennis court, I couldn't resist taking a few minutes to jot a quick post about my observations on some of the behavior under pressure that I observed from the pros at the tournament that we attended.  There are at least a few observations applicable for leaders everywhere.

Sales and Marketing Managers: Use the Lead Refinery Approach to Improve Results

I talk with a lot of marketing and sales managers and have spent most of my life working in these environments. In spite of the dramatic advancements in software tools available, I still find gaping holes in the way many sales and marketing organizations manage and account for the flow of leads into the sales pipeline.   Although there are undoubtedly some technology constraints, I suspect that the primary issue is one of process more than anything else.  Employed properly, changes in the output of the lead refinery foreshadow expansion or contraction of volume in the sales pipeline. 

Here are some thought-starters for employing the Lead Refinery approach to improve your performance: