What Great Books Have to do with Great Project Management

Last week, I taught “Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers” at Portland State University’s Professional Development Center, a two-day workshop for (not surprisingly) project managers. All of them in this class had been around the block many times—very experienced PM’s from a variety of industries ranging from health care to electricity, public works to education.

In the class, we explore personal and social characteristics that help leaders really lead, and by that I mean rally teams, overcome obstacles, manage change.  In some circles, and certainly in the class, these abilities are known collectively as “Emotional Intelligence” (EI).  Beyond cognitive understanding, beyond technical expertise, what sets apart exceptional performers and outstanding leaders from also-rans is this:  They’re confident, compassionate, optimistic, service-oriented and–therefore–influential.

We use the work of psychologist Daniel Goleman, specifically his book Working with Emotional Intelligence, as a framework for talking about this otherwise murky territory. Goleman gives us a model of 25 “competencies” (his word) to consider, and in the class we deeply investigate 11 of them most relevant to project leadership. We also discuss how to improve in each area. How does one become more self confident? More optimistic? What does it take to be a better listener or a better collaborator?

You don’t have to think about it for more than a minute to realize there’s no add-water-and-stir solution for better EI.  Our EI is shaped by experience, role models, nature, maturity, self awareness and education.  But what kind of education develops emotional intelligence?  I’m sure you won’t be hugely surprised if I suggest that a liberal arts education helps develop EI.  For a moment, I’ll pick specifically on English, on the study of literature and, more specifically, novels.  I’m not talking about a light read with an engaging plot and lots of pages, the kind of book you’re happy to partner up with on a long flight.  I’m talking about an enduring piece of work, something that’s already stood the test of time and literary critics, the kind of book you read and remember, with characters you can’t shake, whose thoughts you remember, whose actions you re-live and wonder about afterwards.  Books that stay with you, in other words.

How do great books make you more “emotionally intelligent”?  By taking you inside what drives other people–their experience, their distortions, their agendas, oddities, misunderstandings, strengths, misgivings.  Where better to learn to “understand others” (an EI competency in the Goleman model) than by getting inside the memorable and enduring characters in great fiction?

We talked about this in my EI for Project Managers class.  I was heartened to discover several of them enjoy good fiction regularly.  One said she recently re-read Anna Karenina.  Wow.  The emotional realities of project management pale by comparison!  I confess I haven’t read much Russian literature.  (I love the plays, though.  The Cherry Orchard–now there’s a lesson for business leaders!)

When we discussed the EI competency known as “Achievement Drive,” one aspect we examined was the importance of believing in the work you do, which is hard when all the chat at work is about “profit” and rarely about “purpose.”  Nonetheless, many of the seasoned Project Managers in this class had a genuine sense of purpose about their respective projects.  One construction project manager said he found it easy to share his achievement drive with others on his team because they were all glad to be building a new city library.  After our conversations in class about how great literature can prepare you for great project management, he said he was even more delighted to be working on that particular project.

As the class drew to a close, we reviewed the various social characteristics of EI (communication, empathy, political awareness), and we shared some of the ways we’d pursue continuous improvement in the future.  It was at that a moment the library project manager handed me a brand new copy of War and Peace. (I’d admitted earlier in the day I hadn’t read it.)

“It’s a gift,” he said.  “Thanks for reminding us all about great books.”

I was very touched. 

Guess I know what I’ll be reading if we find ourselves snowed in which is, after all, ideal weather for Russian fiction.

Sorting Through What Life Has to Offer

            Despite of—well, actually, because of—my belief that a liberal arts education is essential for business leaders and essential for business if it’s to have any real future and to serve a purpose … because of all that, I teach a course in Engineering Management at Portland State University.  The course for these graduate students heading into management and leadership in engineering and high tech is, I’m happy to say, a popular elective called, simply, “Writing and Presentations.”

            About halfway through the term, I try to teach something about the art of writing a good essay because I’m sure that if you can write a good essay, you can write just about anything—certainly anything in the realm of business or technical writing, which these students will face.  This quarter, as we worked our way through as much of the essay “how-to” as I’m able to impart, I asked them to write an essay about whether college should be job training.  I asked them this:  “What’s the point of going to college?  Is college supposed to be job training?”  Then I asked them to consider the relative advantages of professional schools (engineering, business, architecture) and a liberal arts education. 

            Most of my students are from other countries—India, Turkey, Botswana, Saudi Arabia and China—so I’m not really sure what I expected.  I wondered whether they’d argue in favor of the often more specialized educations offered by universities in other nations where students attend “the economic university” or “the software engineering university.”  I thought maybe they’d commend a mechanical engineering curriculum, steeped in determinism and honed for immediate usefulness. 

            Instead, many of them presented informed, even inspired, arguments in favor of a broad education, saying that it enables critical thinking, bolsters communication, and supplies substance to what otherwise can be empty financial gyrations.   A really insightful observation, offering a perspective I hadn’t actually considered myself, came from a young man from Bhutan.  He had this to say:

“Consumerism has become the norm of the current global economic system.  As a result, every educational institution is systemized to supply trained workers for new industries.  The shifting demand of intellectual paradigm to meet the needs of consumerism has suppressed the value of a broad education system.  Consequently, professional schools have taken a tunnel vision approach to education and have focused on preparing students for a specific line of work.  A fresh entrant in college, who has barely turned 20 years old, has to focus on narrow topics such as marketing, accounting, engineering, etc.  This essentially hinders the student’s perspective, forcing them to prepare themselves within narrow topics.  In fact, it is too early an age for students to distinguish their actual talents and apply them to serve humanity.”

            What a refreshing idea—that talents, ingenuity and intellect should “serve humanity.”  But that wasn’t the surprise.  Of course we should be preparing people, students, to be contributors in meaningful ways.  As educators, if we’re not doing that, what are we doing?   No, that wasn’t the surprise.  What caught me about what he said was that students who find themselves in professional schools at too tender an age are, in his view, robbed forever of the chance to know their own talents and abilities well enough to figure out where best to use them.

            Professional education assumes that’s all water under some bridge.  Having sorted through all that life has to offer prior to age 20, we’ve chosen, say, marketing as our life’s work.  But without having explored language, culture, philosophy, logic and history, how would a student know if marketing was “it”?  I think that’s what the young man from Nepal is suggesting.

           (The thing I like most about teaching is how much I learn from my students.)

“Pitfalls” Old and New

I was crawling around in the dusty library stacks the other day, pursuing a bit of research in old (and I mean old) copies of Practical Accountant.  I’m talking about 1978 through 1981.  I read the tables of contents of every edition and didn’t find what I was looking for, alas. 

However, as often happens when one opens an old volume, there can be interesting surprises lurking in the pages.  The lurking surprise was in an article from 1979 called “Seventeen Pitfalls in Selecting a Computer System.”   Having spent most of my career in Information Technology (despite an early and enduring foundation in the Liberal Arts), I couldn’t resist checking out an article about what went wrong with technology purchases in 1979.  I wondered how pitfalls then compare to pitfalls now. 

I was happy to discover that not all of the 17 they worried about back then are worries today.  For example, we no longer worry about what programming languages can be supported by which platforms.  Concerns about obsolescence (buying technology that can’t be upgraded) have gone away, as have many worries about expansion capability, since many vendors have designed their products to be scalable for future growth.  That’s all good news.

Interesting, though–and rather awful–was the #1 item on the list, which is still very much alive and well, I’m sorry to say.  Pitfall #1:  “Defining objectives and requirements poorly.”  Thirty years later, it’s still coming up as #1 on many project “post mortem” lists, when debriefing about what went well and writing up ”lessons learned” (which often become “lessons ignored”). 

Defining requirements is usually a job for a Business Analyst, and in my experience, some of the very best Business Analysts have been people with Liberal Arts backgrounds–people who can write, analyze abstraction, organize information, document findings.  Engineers usually don’t like that sort of thing.  Project Managers are often impatient with this phase of work (even though many of them know how important it is).  Business leaders tend to shortchange its importance. 

But Business Analysts know that organizing and articulating what’s needed is an essential step.  Technology solutions that move ahead to design, for example, without taking into account all the requirements miss things.  Testing without fully documented requirements is haphazard at best.

Even if all that doesn’t sound terribly familiar to you, let me tell you what I think this article from 1979 actually means:  We’ve gotten better about acquiring technology.  Many things that used to go wrong don’t go wrong anymore, and we have engineering to thank for that.  The technology itself is less rickety, less risky.  It’s more adaptable, easier to scale–all good things for businesses that grow and change. 

However, one very important area still comes up as short as it did 30 years ago, and that is the job of Business Analyst–analyzing and documenting requirements.  This is a job for Liberal Arts majors!

Why?  Businesses are often about abstract, intangible things and often require a clear understanding about things you can’t get your hands on.  Money, for one thing.  And data.  And process.  Even ideas, invention.   

Consider how, for example, software is developed to perform a particular job function.

Have you ever been to a restaurant where the waitress took your order on a handheld device?  I don’t mean a notepad with a pen, not that kind of handheld device.  I mean something about the size of an iPhone.  She taps in your order—halibut fish sandwich with a side salad, ranch dressing—and as soon as she does, it appears on a screen in the kitchen—halibut fish sandwich, side salad, ranch—and the food prep guys get to work on it.  They key in when it’s done, which immediately appears on your waitress’s handheld, and she hops back to the pick-up window to get your order.

How do you suppose that comes into being, that little piece of equipment your waitress now can’t live without?  It comes into being because someone who has really good analytical abilities was able to examine and decompose and finally translate the restaurant job processes into material that technology developers could use to design a new product.

That’s what a Business Analyst does, and believe me it’s a highly prized skill that not many people are good at.  People who are good at this don’t mind dealing with the abstract.  They’re comfortable with ambiguity, shades of gray rather than black and white.  They’re willing not only to analyze a situation or event but to write about it, and then to revise what’s written as information improves.

Analysis and writing.  You haven’t studied anything like that in your academic career, have you?

In my experience, the best business analysts have Liberal Arts educations.  If you can examine, analyze, de-compose, organize and write, this might be a great place to start your career in business. 

And perhaps in 30 years, Practical Accountant (or its successor) will be able to produce a list of only two or three “pitfalls in selecting a computer system,” and “defining requirements poorly” won’t be on the list.

From the Business School–A Confession

Last week, I met with someone who works in the School of Business at Portland State University. Our meeting was to talk about a program at the university to help working professionals develop as leaders and about how we might team up, the School of Business and the School of Extended Studies, to offer a stronger program than either of us might attempt alone.

During our conversation, he shared a secret with me:  He thinks undergraduates who have their hearts set on careers in business should major in the Liberal Arts.  Why?  Because it isn’t useful to teach “business” to an undergraduate population that lacks knowledge of the context business should operate in.  We’re teaching these undergrads the form (profit-making, marketing) and leaving out the content (why a business is in business, the science, invention, contribution).  Without an underpinning of general knowledge (culture, literature, history), how can business leaders align organizations with purpose, inspire a workforce, or contribute to a greater good?

“Besides,” he went on to say, “you can’t teach an 18-year-old Organizational Behavior. When a teenager thinks about ‘behavior,’ it’s probably all the ways they’ve been in trouble in their young lives.  They have no context whatsoever for organizational behavior.” 

I’ve been happily surprised in recent weeks to discover how many people agree that an education in history, culture, science, language—anything other than the specific ways and wiles of commerce—is necessary for business people and, so far, mostly overlooked.  I admit I wasn’t expecting to hear it from within the walls of the School of Business, and maybe I’m telling a tale out of school.  But what a nice thought it is for a moment—an army of literate, well-rounded, maybe even ethical business leaders whose launch point was a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, linguistics, geography, or English, who then went on to graduate school to study finance, marketing, project management and, of course, organizational behavior.

One other heartening discovery this week:  The Carnegie Foundation is operating a three year project to “ensure that undergraduate students who major in business and other professional fields also gain the benefits of a strong liberal arts education” (http://carnegiefoundation.org/programs/index.asp?key=1862, accessed 30 August 2009).  The driver of this project, as it’s described on their site, is the increasing number of business undergrads, many of whom are the first in their families to attend college.  I guess the assumption is, if your parents had a broad education, perhaps you’ve had some, too.  If you parents haven’t, then you’ve probably missed out on that and, tracking directly into a business program, you’ll continue to miss out on it.  Without it, our future business leaders “will not gain the intellectual, moral, and civic learning they need to be responsible individuals and members of their communities.”

So that’s more good news, not just for business but for students of the liberal arts.  If you’re working your way through studies of language and literature, you already know how much richer you are for having done so.  What you may not have been aware of is that some people in key places have noticed the same thing, and can take it a step further than you can.  They see your education as valuable to business, and this can be just the groundwork you need to put your degree to work.

College Isn’t Job Training

College isn’t job training.

I’ll probably be detained in an airport now for uttering such heresy, given that many college students think they’re preparing themselves for “careers” and colleges encourage them to think this. It’s sad to consider it, really, because so many people, once they’re out of college and launched in these careers, spend a lot of time complaining about their jobs, their bosses, the commute, co-workers, deadlines, the company’s policies, salaries and all the rest. It’s sort of terrible to consider that college skills training is preparing you for a career you can spend the rest of your life complaining about.

Of course there’s more to complain about these days—lack of jobs, the promise of instability, the increasingly unlikely prospect of home ownership. Depending on your outlook, these may seem like the least of our future problems. A college education that’s been aimed at preparing a workforce of “skilled” workers to sustain business-as-we’ve-known-it is launching crops of graduates ready for a professional world that seems to be behind us.

I realize that sounds gloomy and critical, but I assure you I’m neither. Personally, I think there’s a better future ahead, one that’s accountable to things that matter (health, knowledge, ecosystems, community) and not as beholden to things that don’t (pursuit of inestimable profit, multi-national conglomerates, optimizing cheap labor). It’s going to take time, courage and character to transform us, but it is coming.

Readying our entire culture for such an overhaul requires courage, clarity of thought, optimism, commitment, creativity and a willingness to challenge the status quo. It also requires patience, fortitude and sacrifice. These kinds of abilities and qualities aren’t “skills” you pick up in Marketing 301 or Advanced Linear Programming. There’s no “job skills training” for what we need to help us find our way out of this financial morass and onto a better economy.

What’s needed for that are people who are educated, not skills-trained.  We need a workforce prepared to deal with the unknown, rather than people who must correctly predict an outcome. We need vision and imagination, an understanding of the shared human experience. Most of all we need clarity, a willingness to recognize and embrace an idea that may be very different from what we’ve relied on in the past, and the ability to separate substance from drivel (which may be the opposite of training in Marketing, which promotes the idea that drivel is substance).

Students of the Liberal Arts are prepared with an education they’ll be putting it to use in an economy no one yet can envision. Liberal Arts students are less likely to be thrown by the kind of uncertainty that’s ahead because their forays into understanding the driving forces of history, culture and human motivation are preparing them to deal with uncertainty.

Instead of Resumes? Misguided Advice

Job seekers on alert for the latest ideas asked me about a novel suggestion they recently read online:  Don’t prepare a resume.  Don’t submit one either.  A resume just becomes an opportunity for rejection, something for “the corporate behemoth” to chew up and spit out.  This advice comes from author Seth Godin, a blog post he wrote last year but that’s apparently still stirring interest. 

Instead, Mr. Godin says, blog.  Or have a reputation that precedes you and a handful of extraordinary letters recommending you. 

When it comes to communication, it’s always a good idea to shake things up.  Be different, not predictable.  But I don’t really think the world is ready to replace resumes with blogs, or predictably upbeat recommendation letters—especially in an economy where no one is looking for you. 

Mr. Godin’s advice encourages job seekers to see themselves, and present themselves, as “remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular,” not as “ordinary” people seeking average jobs.  Cartwheels and handsprings (metaphorically speaking) win the day, as you demonstrate in blog, word and deed what a star you are.  It’s the “American Idol” approach to life:  Look at me.  It’s all about me.  You want me.  If you don’t (for some unfathomable reason) want me, it’s your loss.

Sorry, I’m not buying it.  It’s not about you.  Work, and your willingness to do it, is a contribution, your contribution.  You, prospective job candidates, are giving your talents and abilities to an organization that needs you.  It’s not about you, it’s about them.  Look at them.  You want them. 

So should we replace resumes with other forms of self promotion?  I don’t think so, if for no other reason than no HR rep is going to cruise hundreds of thousands of (mostly poorly written) blogs looking for the right fit.  A resume is a calling card that says “I’m interested, and here’s what I have to offer.  I might be right for your company/this position.  Please take a closer look.” 

No rule says you can’t have a blog, too, but the likelihood that the entire hiring culture in the western world would start looking for qualified (even exceptional) candidates in blog-dom is pretty remote.

Revenge of the English Major

“What are the two things that keep people in your organization from advancing?”

That’s the question Brian McCarthy posed to a manager he met this summer from one of the “Big Four” accounting firms.  Brian, who’s on the faculty in the School of Business at Portland State University, was one of several dads attending camp with their sons.  So was the Big Four manager, and Brian took the opportunity to ask him this one question:  What is it that that keeps people from being promoted where you work?

The dad from the Big Four didn’t hesitate:  “Presentation skills and writing ability.” 

Brian was somewhat surprised, in part because he expected something more like “global team management” or “advanced negotiation skills” to top the list, and in part because the answer came back lightning fast.  Not a moment’s hesitation.  In a word, communication—or lack of it—holds people back.

But it makes perfect sense:  Business leaders who can’t express brilliant, business-saving, even life-saving ideas might as well not have them, since they can’t execute on those ideas in a vacuum. 

“It’s the revenge of the English major, isn’t it?” Brian announced.  “We advertise for all these technical skills, but what we really want is people who can communicate!”

I knew that.