Project Communication

This book is currently under review, more details will be added when available

Teams are the center piece of any project. Without a team you will most likely fail at meeting any criteria for a successful project. Jackie, a personal friend of mine, has written a great book that will open your mind on a different approach to teams.

This book is currently under review, more details will be added when available

Drive is a must read for anyone that has to motivate people to do anything. As a project manager, part of your job is inspiring people to work on or support your project. You would be foolish not to read this book and follow its advice.

Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money —the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home —is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

It was such an innocuous question, "Working on an article; what is the biggest problem you see with project governance at orgs? Can you comment?" Can I comment? Really? That is like cheese to a mouse. Where could I start—bureaucracy, draconian process, poor executive sponsorship, disengaged leaders? Plenty of fodder, because they all lead to project failure. I fired off, "Creating an over bureaucratic morass stifling innovation & implementing process instead of cultivating leaders." Then the maelstrom started and it went directly to the gap between the executives and projects managers. Naomi Caietti, Robert Kelly and I had a great conversation. Most of the thread is below.

This book is currently under review, more details will be added when available

If you want to explore and improve your leadership style, this is a "Must Read." Why leadership? Because projects struggle under managers and they excel under leaders. Not only that, but this also gets you thinking and talking like your business leaders. How can you communicate with them if you do not think like them?

Touted as the "Greatest Business Book of All Time" (Bloomsbury UK), In Search of Excellence has long been a must-have for the boardroom, business school, and bedside table.

Although this book it out of print, it has a wonderful and easy to use "checklist" to prep up for a negotiation. It is a great follow-on read to Getting to Yes! and talks heavily about the process of negotiation.

Corporate negotiation is a process like all other business strategies. In today's challenging and ever-changing business environment, it is imperative to understand negotiations from the perspective of both the buyer and the seller. In Strategic Negotiation, Dietmeyer and Kaplan use a research-based approach to negotiation that assists sales professionals in reaching their own business goals, while ensuring that their customers meet budget and professional objectives as well-going beyond win-win to achieve true, measurable business value for all parties at the negotiating table. The authors use their own strategic, four-step negotiation process to teach sales professionals how to attain quantifiable value in their dealings:

Every project manager is in sales. PMs are always trying to convince someone to give people, money, time, expertise, knowledge, etc. They are always in sales mode... they just don't think of it that way.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in nine Americans works in sales. Every day more than fifteen million people earn their keep by persuading someone else to make a purchase.

But dig deeper and a startling truth emerges:

True North shows how anyone who follows their internal compass can become an authentic leader. This leadership tour de force is based on research and first-person interviews with 125 of today ’s top leaders —with some surprising results. In this important book, acclaimed former Medtronic CEO Bill George and coauthor Peter Sims share the wisdom of these outstanding leaders and describe how you can develop as an authentic leader. True North presents a concrete and comprehensive program for leadership success and shows how to create your own Personal Leadership Development Plan centered on five key areas:

• Knowing your authentic self
• Defining your values and leadership principles
• Understanding your motivations
• Building your support team
• Staying grounded by integrating all aspects of your life

Project Management is one to the few disciplines where the glass ceiling seems to be non-existent. Daily our multicultural, multigenerational, multigender teams build great products for our businesses. We need to understand ourselves and others better. Lean In is a great book for either gender to read to learn more about how to avoid gender issues on your projects.

Thirty years after women became 50 percent of the college graduates in the United States, men still hold the vast majority of leadership positions in government and industry. This means that women ’s voices are still not heard equally in the decisions that most affect our lives. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg examines why women ’s progress in achieving leadership roles has stalled, explains the root causes, and offers compelling, commonsense solutions that can empower women to achieve their full potential.

Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook and is ranked on Fortune ’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business and as one of Time ’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2010, she gave an electrifying TEDTalk in which she described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which became a phenomenon and has been viewed more than two million times, encouraged women to “sit at the table, ” seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto.

Without a team there is no project, there is no success. One of your primary jobs is to build a team from people you mostly likely do not have authority over. The five key attributes: results, accountability, commitment, conflict, and trust, will help you build a better team quicker.

If you are managing projects in a manufacturing setting, this book is critical. If you are managing a project in a company using the theory of constraints, this book is essential. It is the foundation of a pervasive methodology and the precursor to critical chain project management. he is recommended reading before reading any of the other books on critical chain.