I want to know what you will do about it. I do not want to know what you hope for. I want to know what you will work for. I do not want your sympathy for the needs of humanity. I want your muscle. As the wagon driver said when they came to a long, hard hill, âThem thatâs going on with us, get out and push. Them that ainât, get out of the way.â
Robert Fulghum, author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Traditional management practices focus on managing systems and responses, increasing efficiency, and creating more profit in the short term â what we call âleft of the lineâ activities.
Management in the 21st century requires much more than this. The new rules of management demand a relentless focus on implementation (creation and execution of projects). In other words, the actions that live to the right of the line. I believe implementing projects that matter is the most important thing we do personally, in our teams and in our organisations.
Wherever we look â and we will be looking in lots of places â we find that implementing important projects and doing work that matters is the key to productivity, fulfilment, engagement, innovation and success.
There is no magic bullet that managers can call on to grow profits, drive creativity, increase performance, lift engagement â or even give us world peace. But if there were, it would be implementing projects that matter.
So that we are on the same page, a project is very basically a significant outcome delivered by a specific time. Having a book published by the end of the year is a project â doing more writing isnât a project. Running the City to Surf this year without walking at all is a project. Joining a gym isnât. Increasing sales by 15 per cent this quarter is a project. Growing the business isnât.
This book is divided into three domains: personal, team and organisation. Letâs look at why managers face an implementation imperative in each of them.
Personal
Your hardware â your neurology, neural pathways, biology, biochemistry and physique â has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. As a species, features that have enhanced our chances of survival have been selected, while features that diminished our chances of survival have been eliminated. Now bear with me while we do a little time travel into our deep past.
In round numbers, we have been hunter-gatherers for many hundreds of thousands of years. During that time, evolution honed our skills as hunter-gatherers so we could survive in the world as it was then. New discoveries show we actually evolved in fits and starts, and it was a 200 000-year period of violent, unpredictable climate change that spurred one of the biggest leaps in our evolution â the leap that actually created what we would recognise as modern-day humans.
About 12 000 years ago people started farming, so we have been farmers rather than hunter-gatherers for only a fraction of the time humans have been around. The industrial revolution started more than 250 years ago, and the information age has been with us for a bit more than a generation â I first used email about 25 years ago.
For most of our evolution the name of the game has been survival. Your hardware was designed so you could survive as a hunter-gatherer in Africa. Your fight-or-flight response is state of the art for that purpose. If a lion crosses your path, a whole bunch of things happen that will help you survive, without you having to think about it. Your senses send signals to the parietal and occipital lobes of the brain along the brain stem, and the amygdala â a tiny region at the top of the brain stem â sends a quick message to the frontal lobe. If your body doesnât get an immediate instruction telling it how to respond, the hypothalamus of the brain takes control and begins a cascade of hormones that, among other things, surges hydrocortisone into your bloodstream to increase blood supply to your major muscles, allowing you to either stand and fight, or run for your life. At the same time, your digestion shuts down, and your immune system is suppressed, so you do not waste any energy on non-essential activities. Your heart rate increases, as adrenaline is released into the blood stream. All of this gives you the best possible chance to survive an imminent threat.
If youâre reading this book, your survival is pretty much taken care of. Youâre not going to get eaten by a lion any time soon. You are going to have a roof over your head, clothes on your back and food in your belly for the rest of your life. The bottom rung of Maslowâs hierarchy of needs is all good.
The game has changed. Now itâs all about thriving in the information age, not surviving in the Stone Age. The game of thriving in the information age is won by implementing the projects that matter, but youâre playing this new game with outdated hardware.
Imagine if you were designed to be great at implementing important projects, and your project was to write a book. When you sat down to start work, youâd get a little dopamine hit (the feel-good drug in your brain), making you feel optimistic and helping you overcome any resistance to starting difficult work. When you hit a roadblock along the way, all sorts of things could kick in to help you overcome it â you would feel more awake, alert, focused, confident and committed (rather than tired, overwhelmed or inadequate, and thinking that anything would be better than this).
Instead you are using hardware that wasnât designed for this. Thatâs fine. It can get the job done but there are a few things that we can do that will make life much easier. The first tip is simply to recognise that while your hardware is absolutely state of the art when it comes to dealing with a lion crossing your path, itâs pretty inadequate for what you are asking of it now. Thatâs about your hardware, not about you. You will struggle, and thatâs to be expected. Go easy on yourself.
The second thing to do is install some hacks and some workarounds that will improve things. And thatâs what the rest of this book will help you with.
The key to personal success and fulfilment
I donât think the key to being successful in your business or career, your relationships, your health, your finances, or anything else for that matter, is being intelligent, or well resourced or even well connected â although these things all help. I think the single most important factor in your success is your ability to implement significant projects.
The problem is, we are told that success is about character. Itâs about integrity. Itâs about attitude. Itâs about discipline. But plenty of people have all of these attributes and still donât achieve wild success.
Itâs still true that we are all 100 per cent responsible for our own success â but itâs just not in the way you think. What if there were some shortcuts to success you werenât aware of? What if these shortcuts allowed you to borrow enough discipline, integrity and winning attitude to achieve your goals? Could it be possible that, where you havenât succeeded, itâs because you didnât create the right context, or put together the right support? In other words, because you didnât structure your success properly?
Every action we take has long-term and short-term implications. In the short term, an action will give us pleasure or pain. In the long term, an action will be either beneficial or detrimental.
As you can see in the fulfilment model shown in figure 1.1, at the bottom level are the stupid things we do. These are the things that give us short-term pain and are detrimental in the long term. For example, for me playing golf is plain stupid. It generally takes me about five years to forget how bad I am at golf. So even though for the previous four years I have knocked back every invitation to play golf, in the fifth year, for some strange reason, I will think itâs a good idea. I will picture the ball sailing down the middle of the fairway and imagine the satisfaction Iâll feel. Of course that illusion is shattered at the first tee, and Iâm in for a frustrating afternoon with the probability of needing therapy to rebuild my damaged psyche. There are things we all do which, however you look at it, are just plain stupid.
Figure 1.1: fulfilment model
Then there are the dangerous things we do. The things that give us short-term pleasure, but are detrimental in the longer term. Junk food is like that for me: I love the taste, enjoy eating it, but half an hour later I regret it. The reason these things are dangerous is that we are set up to do things that give us pleasure or take us away from pain. And historically it was rarely a problem.
Our ancestors didnât have the option of thinking: âFor dinner tonight, shall we spend a day hunting and gathering, get in a good amount of exercise, breathe fresh air, get some sunshine, and then have a meal of organic lean meat, fresh herbs and vegetables? Nah, stuff it. Letâs order a pizza, get some DVDs and drink some beer.â
But now we do have that option, and so the very thing we have evolved to do (take actions that give us immediate pleasure or take away pain) can get us into trouble. We see the evidence of this every day, and experience it in our own lives.
The survival category in the fulfilment model (see figure 1.1) includes the things that cause us pleasure in the short term and are beneficial in the long term. For example eating when youâre hungry, putting on clothes when youâre cold or sleeping when youâre tired. We have evolved to do all these things, because they have helped us survive. These things are easy.
The problem for us today is that we donât need to learn how to implement to survive, but we do need to learn how to implement to thrive. Today, success comes from being able to take actions that give us short-term pain but are beneficial in the long term. The ability to defer gratification is what it takes to achieve our higher goals and aspirations, like fulfilment.
Fulfilment transcends stupidity, danger, survival and even success. Here we choose the short-term discomfort, so we donât suffer long-term pain. At the level of fulfilment, we no longer have the experience of it being painful, even if we are deferring gratification.
Implementation is the key to the top two categories in the fulfilment model â success and fulfilment. The success of your life comes down to the important projects you have implemented. If you review your last 90 days and ask the question âHow successful were they?â the answer will come down to the projects you implemented.
Even more tellingly, if you imagine reviewing your whole life while sitting on your rocking chair on the porch, celebrating your 100th birthday, success will come down to the quality of your relationships of course, and to the projects that you implemented over your life.
Likewise, fulfilment comes from doing great things, contributing what we have to the world, making a difference in the lives of others: in other words, implementing projects that matter.
Before we think about creating and executing projects that matter in our teams and organisation, it is critical we start in our own backyard. Success as a manager canât simply exist in the office. If projects matter, they matter everywhere. So we look first at the personal domain â our health, our money, our family, our fitness, our relationships. Implementing projects that matter here will strengthen our resolve to do so in our teams and our organisations. And we will have integrity â we wonât be telling our people to do as we say, but not as we do.
Team
Many of us spend most of our waking hours at work, and working in teams. This is an incredible responsibility for anybody who is a manager, including, as it does, responsibility for the output of the team and the results that are produced. However, I believe there is an even greater responsibility for the input â the team members who show up and give their life force to their work.
When I teach people about how to think about money, and specifically about spending consciously, I borrow a concept from Your Money or Your Life (a great book by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez about achieving financial independence). Itâs the idea that money equates to life energy. When we work we are exchanging our life energy for money, and when we spend our money we are spendi...