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Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them. – W. Edwards Deming
This is the second post in a series related to Tom Peter’s book ‘the brand you’.
It’s a small book and one that’s I’m slightly regretting having picked to go through because of the eccentric nature of the text. There’s a lot of colour and bold and mixed capitals and other distracting formatting artefacts.
But let’s try and ignore that and focus on the actual points that matter.
What matters for you in your career is the set of projects you have worked on and the project you are working on now.
The “project” is what a researcher might term the unit of analysis for a practising manager.
Projects are the things, according to Peters, that add value in modern organisations.
Now, I don’t think this is entirely correct.
I think there are also processes that add value. For example, organisations are full of scheduled repeated activities that need to be done well for clients to be happy and for services to be delivered. There are a host of “human activity systems” that operate steadily all the time. You can’t argue that these don’t produce value.
But perhaps Peters is talking about adding value and I think we can all see that that’s where a project comes into play. It’s something you do when you want to make something better or do something different or new.
Something that fills a gap in the way in which we do things today.
So how do you choose what projects to work on.
Well, you could never turn down a project because every project has the potential to turn into something big.
But a better strategy might be to go for the projects that address something painful and urgent. Projects that matter. Projects where the problem owner is hanging on by their fingertips.
If you can create something that will make the situation better through your project, you will end up with a grateful client, colleague or boss. Someone who will appreciate what you’ve done and tell others about how great you are.
Where what you’ve created makes a difference even after you’ve moved on.
It’s one thing to find these projects and offer to do them.
But what is it that makes a project successful?
Perhaps we’ll find out later in the book.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
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