When I saw that ProjectManagement.com’s theme for March was Personal PM, I naturally assumed that most of the so-themed offerings would be along the lines of pointing out Project Management’s amazing capacity for scalability. After all, the exact same type of schedule logic (mostly finish-to-start) goes into properly ordering the activities in a wedding as it does in properly ordering tasks to build and launch a space shuttle. But there’s another aspect of Personal Project Management that goes beyond the applicability of its precepts in pursuit of private objectives, and it has to do with our ability as managers to separate our business techniques from our view of ourselves. It’s only natural to have an emotional attachment to our work, in addition to the intellectual and energy investment in making a living. How does one go about making a distinction between the two worlds? Well, let’s start by taking a look at Mario Puzo’s classic, The Godfather.
The line in the title (or a variant) is repeated several times in the movie. As noted, the version in the title comes from a scene where Tom Hagen is having an intense discussion with Sonny Corleone about the recently-thwarted second attempt on his father’s life, with a partial repeat of the quote happening seconds later. It makes a third appearance in two minutes and fifty-three seconds, when Michael states his plan to kill both Sollozzo and the corrupt policeman who broke Michael’s jaw and works as Sollozzo’s bodyguard, McCluskey. Sonny accuses Michael of taking his injuries from McCluskey personally, and invokes the axiom thirty-three seconds later, for a total of four. The quoting or direct reference to this axiom four times in around 3 ½ minutes of dialogue means two things, (1) that all parties to the discussion consider it valid, and (2) the tactics that they are discussing at least have the appearance of breaching that guidance.
So, why is this axiom widely-held, and generally accepted? If I were to attempt a paraphrase, it would be along the lines of “allowing personally-held beliefs to influence what would otherwise be an anodyne management science – based analysis and resulting decisions would expose that analysis and those decisions to irrelevant influences, increasing the odds of a bad outcome.” Since my paraphrase is 49 words long, and “It’s business, not personal” is much shorter and to the point, I can understand why hardened gangsters would prefer the axiom version.
Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…
I’ve had the unfortunate experience of being contradicted by a contractor/consultant (who was new to the PMO) during a high-level meeting, on a matter that (1) was trivial, (2) I was completely in the right, but (3) ended up making me look silly in front of my organizational superiors. I understood in an instant why this person had done so – it was fairly clear that this consultant was attempting to establish credibility, so as to increase the odds of future billable hours, and the opportunity to do so just happened to be at my expense. Alternately, this person could have been simultaneously snarky and wrong, excessively so on both counts, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. But I came to understand that they were taking their Project Management rather personally, as if the basis of their analysis was somehow interwoven with their presented persona, in such a way that one could not have one without the other. This, of course, is in direct contradiction to the not-personal-it’s-business axiom, particularly in my verbose but more precise paraphrase. For if one cannot dispute a given approach to a PM-centric problem without challenging the expertise of the people pushing it, then virtually all subsequent attempts at evaluating other solutions to the problem at hand turn into little more than résumé-based hierarchical angling. With the discussion environment thus compromised, you’re almost guaranteed to come up with a sub-optimal solution. You would, in fact, be lucky to escape without selecting an option that would be, in a more rational room, easily identified as a mistake – hence the reminders in The Godfather to keep clear the distinction between the personal and business decisions.
Ultimately, the axiom we are discussing comes down to the efficacy of the Economic Man theory (essentially that people will always make decisions that will benefit them, personally and economically), and therein lies the problem. Many a calculated Game Theory solution has been shown to be unworkable in the real world due to reliance on the Economic Man theory, indicating that it’s really rather common for people to make business or management decisions based on personal, unquantifiable, entirely subjective elements.
And those elements won’t go away, even if you’ve got Tom Hagen reminding the Project Team emphatically that that shouldn’t be the case.
