Becoming a Man or Woman of Value

 

In my last post, I talked about Seth Godin's Hierarchy of Value. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, in fact over the last few days I've beat that drum pretty consistently. I guess my desire to create value is at the heart of it. Einstein said, "Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value."

I admit that Einstein and Godin may have been talking about different things...but I don't think so. Einstein was a creative problem solver who also said, "The only real valuable thing is intuition." That sounds like part of the creative process to me. "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant," he said. "We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

At the crux of everything we do as project leaders, is the need to provide value—or as Godin puts it, the need to create or invent. As I see it, that's what projects are all about. If projects fail to create some kind of value, they become fruitless exercises. Likewise, as project leaders or individual contributors to a project team, if we fail to climb the hierarchical ladder of value, we soon become irrelevant. What's more, I believe that most people have a desire to create. Which is why our responsibility as project leaders is to facilitate an environment where they can.

Einstein also said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

Empowering individual team members to create makes sense to me. Empowered teams produce projects that provide value. It's been my privilege to occasionally work on such teams and my obligation now to create that environment myself—however in many organizations, this environment isn't as common as it should be.

What are you doing about it? What do you do to empower your team to create?