Lessons from the Monster Garage (Part 1)

 

Monster Garage, the Discovery Channel's popular reality show, takes skilled machinists and automobile enthusiasts and challenges them to take an ordinary vehicles and transform it into a "monster." Such monsters have transformed school buses into floatable party boats and hot-rod mustangs into lawn mowers that can munch grass at 60 miles per hour.

The drama of the show lies in the constraints and the prize. The team of builders must create the new "monster" in five days. If they succeed to the satisfaction of the host, team leader Jesse James, they win a fabulous set of tools and the pride in knowing that they won on Monster Garage. If they lose, however, they do not win the tools, do not leave with pride and watch in later re-runs as James destroys their creation as a failure.

In this pressure-filled environment, we watch as the team begins its work with great optimism and zest. By the end of the show, the teams are more likely to be at each others throats, brandishing welding torches and spitting obscenities while trying to meet the encroaching deadline.

Sound familiar? It should.

Every project manager has experienced the joy of starting new projects, the excitement of the team as they leap into the new work and the overwhelming belief that nothing can stop them. The manager has also seen when deadlines rapidly approach, when tempers flare and sacrifices are …

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