The Project Book

CHAPTER 10 EMBRACE THE NEXT GENERATION

Midway through last year I met with a project manager in his late fifties. I’d been introduced to him following a speech I gave at a conference, and he proceeded to tell me everything that was wrong with project management and ‘young people’ today. I reached for my tablet and battered him over the head with it while tweeting ‘This. Is. How. We. Do. Things. Now’. My Instagram of him lying in the gutter got 3476 likes.

Of course none of that is true. Instead, I politely disagreed with most of what he said and provided facts to support my points. Two weeks later I ran into him again and he said he’d given my response a lot of thought and asked me to mentor him. He admitted to feeling out of touch. Ironically such self-awareness is a value keenly sought after in today’s emotionally intelligent marketplace and demonstrated that he was open to learning.

Most of the points raised in this chapter were covered in those mentoring sessions because although project management hasn’t changed that much in the past couple of decades (barring the introduction of new methods discussed in later chapters), the world most definitely has.

In 1987 I was at an early crossroads in my life. I was a fairly bright, hard-working student, but I didn’t warm to the school system so hadn’t done particularly well (actually I did really badly). So I did what many school leavers did and asked my dad to help me write letters to potential employers. Six weeks later I landed ...