Project Management: Advancing Your Career, Saving Civilization

 

I’ve had a lot of fun on this blog site making (mostly innocent) fun of our friends, the accountants, by pointing out the logical fallacies in many of their management science hypotheses, not the least of which is their idea that the overarching theme of all management is to “maximize shareholder wealth.” Of course, the whole raison’ de etre’ for Project Management as a discipline is to contest that idea, since PM is all about delivering a product or service to the customers’ parameters of scope, cost, and schedule. By transferring the focus of our efforts on the customer, rather than the company’s owners, we PM-types pursue a business approach that is not only inconsistent with the accountants’ world view, it’s actually in opposition to it.

Indeed, I would argue that the basic tenets of Project Management theory are intrinsic to everybody’s career advancement, and to prove it one must only answer a simple question: Why would anyone ever want to give you money? If you answered “in exchange for a good or service I rendered,” go to the head of the class. If you answered “because I maximized shareholder wealth,” then you are either in desperate need of remedial business school, or perfectly suited to write college-level textbooks on quantitative analysis, or both.

Your ability to quickly grasp what others want or need, and provide that to them, is key to any and, arguably, all of the success you will encounter in your career. From managers who need people who can sell merchandise and operate cash registers, to the owners themselves who seek to satisfy their customers’ demands, it is your ability to provide desired goods and services that determines your level of success. Again, the asset managers’ orientation is not set in that direction – but Project Management’s is.

On a larger scale, the shift in emphasis from satisfying the customers to maximizing shareholder wealth is one of the most distinctive indicators that an organization has transitioned from its ascendency and into its decline (for a more complete list of these signposts, check out my second book). The most obvious example of this has to do with the new business. Brand-new businesses seek to satisfy their clients, and their owners will often expend extraordinary effort, their own capital, and much overtime to make this happen. In other words, they will go full-throttle on executing the tenets of Project Management. If they’re smart, they will only think of their own remuneration after their customer base is established. The shift of majority focus away from the customer to the organization’s internal leadership inevitably leads to the organization’s eventual downfall and elimination from economic competition.

And, remember, that’s what the asset managers have been advising executives to do all along.

On an even larger scale, this shift in focus is also a harbinger of governments that have ceased existing for the good of their respective populations, and have begun expending energy and manipulating public policy to ensure the governing class’ own enrichment and continued survival, with the eventual outcome of tyranny and revolution. Fortunately, in capitalistic environs the decline and fall of companies is rarely accompanied by violence, as those companies who listened to the advice of the asset managers merely suffer as their PM-oriented competitors gain more and more market share, until the former ceases being on ongoing concern, and liquidates their remaining assets. But that does not exonerate those who maintain the hypothesis that the point of all management is to maximize shareholder wealth. Example after example, from small businesses, to larger organizations, and even governments, shows that this closely-held idea is actually detrimental to those organizations that embrace it, even on very large scales, i.e., civilization.

To summarize: Individuals and organizations in their ascendency further the goals of their clients and constituencies. Those in decline put the enrichment of the organization ahead of their clients and constituencies, which puts PM squarely on the side of the advancers, including career advancers. ProjectManagement.com’s blog readers are in those ranks.

Any questions?