Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior (Dorset House eBooks)

Staffing a project with people who care passionately about what they’re doing is a recipe for success. Their passion may boil over from time to time, but mopping it up is just part of the price you need to pay to achieve ambitious goals.

Since the inventor of Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe, is a friend, I thought I might look into the details of the Ethernet protocol to see how it was designed. I opened the spec to be informed, not charmed, but to my surprise, I found that the protocol was a thing of substantial beauty. It was spare where it needed to be spare, elegant in concept, and its

The result of this misdirected civility is deep mediocrity. Serious improvement is highly unlikely, and any kind of complete restart or rewrite is just about impossible. No one is ever going to say, “Let’s trash this code and rethink the whole front end,” even when it’s the best thing to do.

The next time you hear someone in your organization refer to a failure to communicate, look underneath for the subtitle. It’s likely to read, “I understand you clearly, but I hate what you’re saying.” Calling this a communication failure turns everyone’s attention away from the real cause—legitimate conflict—and focuses attention instead on a false

In deciding whether or not to tolerate unruly emotions, it’s worth remembering that feelings intrude on work only to the extent that people care about their work. The easy way to make the feelings go away is to hire people who don’t give a damn.

Goal detachment is destructive because people pursuing detached goals are only coincidentally working toward the success of the project; their efforts are just as likely to be inconsequential or even counterproductive.

Why are some projects infested with film critics while others have few or none? There is only one reason: Some management cultures emphasize doing things right, while others emphasize not doing anything wrong. When managers are most concerned about not making mistakes, or at least not being seen as having made mistakes, they send obvious signals, b

One of my clients was receiving project requests from more than one hundred different sources. Each of the requests was in a different form and level of detail, but none gave a coherent picture of what the requestor was trying to achieve.

The system of commitments breaks down when the maker and receiver have different interpretations of whether a commitment has been made and/or what exactly it was.