We Are – Literally – Giving At The Office

 

I must confess that, when I saw December’s them of PM Philanthropy, the term itself struck me as a contradiction, much like “Now, then…,” or “Instant classic.”  Of course, the goal of project management is to complete the work on-time, on-budget, to the customers’ complete satisfaction in terms of quality, reliability, etc. But certainly there’s an undercurrent to PM, one of doing those things better than competing organizations. I think that’s a major draw to projectmanagement.com, reader attention being paid to glean the insight and information that allows our organizations to do PM better than our less-intellectually-curious counterparts. How does philanthropy fit in to this mix?

To find the answer we need only look back in time to observe the eventual outcomes of other management science innovations that led to an enrichment of a broad swath of organizations beyond the original innovators. For example, there’s some debate about whether or not Henry Ford truly introduced the assembly line concept on a large scale (Ransom Olds actually patented the process [1] ), but there’s little doubt that Ford’s success in using it popularized it on such a large scale that its primary alternative – creating manufactured goods by hand – has become the exception in 2015. And, while Ford reaped the initial benefits, the widespread adoption of the assembly line technique revolutionized not only the automobile industry, but manufacturing in general, so that most manufactured goods became cheaper, more widely available, and of higher and more consistent quality. Eventually, everyone benefited from this management science innovation.

Prior to the 1870s, only the rich could afford the whale oil or candles to keep their homes lit at night – most people would simply retire once the sun set. After John D. Rockefeller advanced better oil drilling, extracting, and refinement techniques, kerosene became so cheap that keeping homes or business lit after dark became viable for almost everybody [2]. Of course Standard Oil benefited handsomely in the near-term; but, eventually, everybody’s standard of living was significantly raised.

These two are dramatic and extreme examples, but the pattern repeats itself over and over: a management science innovation is developed, and aired out in the free marketplace of ideas. Sooner or later a company or economic concern adopts (or adapts) the hypothesis, and puts it to the test in the real world, where it either works outright, works after some tweaking, or flat-out fails. Unfortunately, the free market economy is a hopelessly complex (I would even argue chaotic) environment, and these hypotheses are extremely difficult to evaluate in clear-cut causality analyses. Sometimes valid ideas are used and the organization fails, and other times invalid ideas are adopted but somehow become associated with repeatable success. 

Which brings us back to project management and philanthropy. The basics of project management, like the assembly line, have been proven to give a competitive edge to the project teams that employ them, and on a consistent basis. Projectmanagement.com and the Project Management Institute® aren’t popular because they offer titillating click-bait ads on the right-hand margins of social media sites – they’re popular because the serve as a crucible for burning away marginal ideas and business practices, helping to point the way to the best techniques for bringing in the project’s scope on-time and on-budget, and, yes, to do so better than your company’s (or even your project team’s) competitors. The now-familiar pattern re-emerges, and project work on a broad scale begins to be performed better, benefitting many, many more people than had originally profited from adopting the innovative practices. 

And that benefiting of the macroeconomic society as a whole, my fellow project managers, is how PM Philanthropy is truly expressed.
 

  (1)Assembly line. (2015, November 30). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:33, December 6, 2015, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Assembly_line&oldid=693187355.
 (2) http://fee.org/freeman/john-d-rockefeller-and-the-oil-industry/, retrieved December 6, 2015, 14:07 MST.