Purpose Is a Risk Factor
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is a leading expert in project management and strategy implementation, recognized by Thinkers50 with the prestigious award “Ideas into Practice.” He is the creator of concepts like The Project Economy and the Project Manifesto. He is author of Lead Successful Projects (2019, Penguin) The Project Revolution (2019, LID) and The Focused Organization (2012 Gower). He has been teaching project management for more than a decade to senior executives at Duke CE, Skolkovo, Solvay Business School, and Vlerick. Antonio has held executive PMO positions at PricewaterhouseCoopers, BNP Paribas, and GlaxoSmithKline. Former Chairman of the Project Management Institute, he is the co-founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute and the global movement Brightline.
The project that changed how I think about impact isn’t one I led. It’s one I’ve watched, taught and used in keynotes for the better part of a decade. And for most of that decade, I used it wrongly—because I only ever told the first half.
Here is the first half: In 2008, a Danish utility called DONG Energy was one of the most coal-intensive companies in Europe, responsible for something close to a third of Denmark’s carbon emissions. It set out to invert that ratio. Not tweak it…invert it.
It renamed itself Ørsted, sold off the oil and gas business, and bet the entire company on offshore wind—a technology that, at the time, was expensive, unproven at scale, and widely regarded as a subsidy farm. By 2019, 86% of its energy came from renewable sources. It closed its last coal-fired power station. It became the largest developer of offshore wind on earth.
And the part I always emphasized, because it is the genuinely great project lesson: The transformation wasn’t faith. It was engineering economics. Ørsted ordered turbines at a volume nobody had ever ordered them at, deliberately, to force the cost curve down—and it worked. The economics arrived because somebody built them.
That’s the slide. It’s a wonderful slide.
Then I looked at the second half…
The half that never makes …
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"No Sane man will dance." - Cicero |
