The New Manager Mindset

Chapter 5. The What Over the How

A lot of industries have passionate professionals. A lot of those professionals like to hang around in discussion groups, asking for advice, offering it (frequently without even being asked), bouncing ideas off each other, and debating the ins and outs of a hundred different aspects of the job, whatever the job might be.

A lot of those debates—a lot—end up being about process. They end up being about the way you do things, what order you do them in, and how it all turns out at the end. Process, a lot of people say, is the key to success. To do anything well on a consistent basis, you must be able to repeat what you did well previously. If you can do something well twice, the thinking seems to go, you should write it down, wrap it up, send it off to the textbook writers, the authorities, the experts, and record it in the annals of history. You, after all, now have it all tied up in a pretty red bow. You’ve mastered process.

Trouble is, nothing about the success of process is provable. Not in soft-skill-focused professional work, that is. Not in office life, where projects come with so many variables it’s nearly impossible to find two that are even all that much alike. The number of people, the people themselves, their skillsets, everyone’s time constraints, the budget, the deadline, the reason for the deadline, vacations, health emergencies, holidays, technology, you name it—every last detail of a project is as variable as the last one.

In a couple ...