Book review and summary, Part II:

Chapter 5: Emotion

“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Mother Theresa

Scientific research shows that Mother Theresa’s precept is true for most of us. Charity organizations have known this for a long time: we do not give to “poverty in Africa”, but we sponsor this or that child. It is very difficult for us to feel compassion for statistics. Although we are aware that the economical situation in Africa is dreadful, we often do not feel concerned enough to act. Seeing an individual suffer, and knowing that we can do something to soothe their ordeal, is quite different.

Charity organizations are not the only ones needing to make people feel concerned. Managers, teachers, politicians and many others need to motivate their colleagues, their pupils, their troops.

What should you be looking for in order to motivate human beings? Appeal to what matters to them. And what matters to them? What are they concerned about?

The answer is simple: themselves. You therefore need to appeal to… their personal interest, and explain: “what can you gain from it” in the messages and ideas you want to convey. How many teachers have heard their pupils ask “But what’s the point of it?”. Do you think pupils are motivated to learn if their teacher cannot answer this question? And what if we could tell them that algebra improves your video game performances, would a teacher hesitate to say it? Would any teacher doubt that it would make the pupils more attentive?

If you have their personal interest on your side, don’t hesitate. Don’t beat around the bush. Don’t say: “People will feel safe with GoodYear Tires”, say: “You will feel safe with GoodYear Tires”.

There is however a more subtle way to appeal to the people’s personal interests. In 1982, psychologists carried out a survey on persuasion: students visited homeowners and asked them to answer questionnaires for a presentation. At the time, cable TV was only just beginning and most people had only vaguely heard of it. The survey was meant to compare the efficiency of two different approaches to make people subscribe to cable television, which was to be rolled out a month later.

In the first approach, the following text was presented:

“Cable television will provide its subscribers with more extensive news and entertainment services. Used appropriately, it gives the viewer freedom to plan in order to enjoy the programs on offer. The subscribers may spend more time at home with their family, on their own or with friends, thus saving the hassle of a night out, as well as babysitting and petrol expenses.

In the second approach, the homeowners were asked to imagine a precise scenario:

“Take a few moments and imagine how cable television is going to allow you to enjoy more extensive news and entertainment services. When you know how to use it, you will be able to plan ahead the events you want to watch. Think about it: no more hassle for a night out, not to mention the savings on babysitting and fuel. You will be able to spend time at home, with your family, on your own, or with your friends.”

The differences between the two texts may seem minor. But count the number of times the word you is used in both samples.

One month after the survey, cable television was rolled out in the city and the researchers analyzed the homeowners’ subscriptions. Result: 20% of the first group had subscribed, in keeping with the subscription rate in the area; on the other hand, in the second group, 47% of the homeowners had subscribed.

The subtitle of the article the researchers published was “Is imagining making things happen”. The answer was: it is.

The benefit to the buyer here was not indeed all this valuable. The main argument was: “by subscribing to cable TV, you save yourself the hassle of getting out of your house” (!). These results suggest that – more so than their importance – it is in fact the tangible and concrete aspect of the benefit that clearly comes out when people imagine them, which make them feel concerned.

There is indeed no need to promise the earth: it is often enough to promise reasonable benefits people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.

Personal interest, however, does not explain everything, as Abraham Maslow attempted to demonstrate in his famous pyramid. A recent study presented the following scenario to a selection of people:

Imagine a company offering its employees a $1,000 bonus should they achieve a number of objectives. Here are three ways of presenting the bonus to the staff:

1. Imagine what $1,000 means: a deposit on a new car, or the new kitchen you’ve been dreaming about for a long time.
2. Think of how reassuring it would be to know that you had $1,000 aside in case of hard times.
3. Think of what this $1,000 represent: the company acknowledges the role you play in its global performances. It is not wasting its money.

When people were asked which presentation would personally appeal to them, most people answered the third. It is good for self-esteem, and it is obvious that $1,000 can either be spent or saved. But the value of the study was in the answer these people gave when asked which proposal would be the best for others. The majority answered the first proposal, followed by the second one. In other words, people thought that they were motivated by self-esteem, but that the others were motivated by a deposit on a new car. It therefore appears that many of us believe that everyone except us is living in Maslow’s cave, i.e. the bottom of the pyramid, where primary needs are fulfilled.

Note: And what if people answered in this manner because, deep inside, they favored proposals 1 and 2 but did not wish to appear materialistic to the researchers’ eyes? In this case, the results would be the same, but the interpretation would be radically different.

Let us now look at the power of emotions with this practical case: all Algebra teachers have heard their pupils ask: “Why am I learning this? When am I ever going to use it?” Let’s look at three attempts at answering this question:

- Message 1: During a conference entitled “Algebra for All”, the following answers were proposed to the question “Why study algebra?”:

• Algebra provides methods for moving from the specific to the general. It involves discovering the patterns among items in a set and developing the language needed to think about and communicate it to others.
• Algebra provides procedures for manipulating symbols to allow for understanding of the world around us.
• Algebra provides a vehicle for understanding our world through mathematical models.
• [...]Algebra is the basic set of ideas and techniques for describing and reasoning about relations between variable quantities.

Comment: This message is the perfect illustration of the “curse of knowledge”. It has obviously been written by specialists, who remain on an abstract level. Would a sulky pupil suddenly become motivated and excited by algebra once he is told that algebra “provides procedures for manipulating symbols to allow for understanding the world around us”? These phrases are, above all, definitions of algebra, not reasons to study algebra.

- Message 2: Here is an answer written with reasons commonly given to pupils to explain why they must study algebra and taken from the Internet:

• You have to pass your exams.
• All Math and Science courses require knowledge of algebra.
• In order to get a place at a good university, you need to have good grades at Math.
• And even if you never go into higher education, the reasoning skills you learn with algebra will help you buy a house, make up a budget, etc.

My brother is a salesman in a high-tech business. He’s always had a problem with Math, but now he realizes that the hard work he did has improved his analytical skills and help him today to better present his products to his customers.

Comment: This message is safe from the curse of knowledge and remains concrete. It nonetheless remains in Maslow’s cave because it addresses primary needs. The two reasons given are 1) because you have no choice and 2) in order to carry on doing it. The most efficient part is the last, with a concrete “real-life” story showing that algebra can have concrete benefits.

- Message 3: Here is the answer of a high school teacher:

When his 9^th Grade pupils ask him: “When are we going to use this?”, he answers: “Never. You will never use it.”

Then, he tells them that if people lift weights, it is not to prepare in case they are attacked in the street one day. You lift weights so that you can knock over a forward at football, or to carry your shopping bags, or to keep fit, or to lift up your grandchild without feeling stiff the following day. You do Math to improve your ability to reason logically, in order to become a better lawyer, doctor, architect, prison guard or even a parent.

MATH IS FITNESS TRAINING FOR THE BRAIN. It is a means (for most people), not an end.

Comment: Here is a much more efficient message using already explained methods: surprise – in order to capture attention: “Never. You will never use it”; the help of an analogy – fitness training; and it rises up Maslow’s pyramid because it deals with levels such as Learning or Self-Fulfillment. The message is that, by studying algebra, we better realize our potential.

Let’s compare the three messages in a table with the 6 principles presented in the book (you can use it at home ) :

Principles	Message 1	Message 2	Message 3
Simplicity	-	-	+
Unexpected	-	-	+
Concrete	-	+	+
Credibility	-	-	-
Emotion	-	+	++
Story	-	+	-

Chapter 6: A Story

Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, 1990’s. A nurse has been watching a newborn for several hours. Suddenly, the baby turns dark blue, almost black. The medical team immediately calls for a doctor and a radiologist and prepare to intervene, convinced that it is a pulmonary collapse – a wide-spread problem for babies placed under artificial respiration – and where a hole has to be made into the chest, in order to insert a tube and suck out the air in order to allow the lungs to fill up again.

But the nurse is convinced that it’s a heart problem. As soon as she saw the baby’s color, she’s suspected that he was suffering a pneumopericardium: air filling the pocket around the heart and stopping it from beating. She therefore tries to stop her colleagues’ preparations screaming “It’s the heart!”. But her colleagues point at the heart monitor showing that the baby’s heart is beating normally. She insists, pushes their hands away and orders them to be quiet placing a stethoscope on the child’s chest.

Not a sound. The heart is not beating.

A neonatal surgeon enters the room and the nurse immediately hands him a syringe. “Pneumopericardium. Prick the heart.” The radiologist, who has just received the test results, confirms the nurse’s diagnostic. The surgeon inserts the syringe into the heart and slowly releases the air pocket preventing it from beating. The baby is safe.

Later, the team understood why the monitor had misled them: it was measuring the electrical activity commanding the heart beats, and this had not stopped: the heart was simply unable to respond to it because of the air pocket pressure.

In his book Sources of Power (which will be reviewed next week ), Gary Klein tells us this story pointing out that it is an example of the usefulness of stories: they are extremely efficient learning tools, and they are rich in teachings, which is why they are so abundant in all circles. They show how context can lead individuals to take the wrong decisions, and highlight the causal relations previously unidentified and the unexpected solutions that the characters have found to solve problems.

The specific teachings from this story are very interesting for medical staff. Even for those of us who do not work in this industry, this story can affect us and make us think: it’s the story of a woman who was not afraid to come out of her role, who did not give up despite the group’s pressure, who saved a life by rejecting the hospital’s hierarchy; a nurse who gave the correct diagnostic to a neonatal surgeon.

The power of this story is that it has a dual aspect: it is a simulation – showing how to act – and an inspiration – motivating to act. These two benefits have in common that they incite action, and this is what is needed.

In your opinion, for a medical team, which is the most revealing and inspiring to act: this story or a banal: “When a baby under artificial respiration turns blue, you should systematically check her heart with a stethoscope so as to exclude a pneumopericardium?”

In every profession, we “talk shop”, often using obscure technical words the majority cannot understand. We tell one other small professional mishaps, as anecdotes, not failing to mention the technical details. These stories are more than a mere social function fulfilling the desire to share with other humans. They are used to share valuable information, to allow others to identify with the storyteller, to put themselves in his/her shoes, and to be able to solve problems more easily when they happen. These stories are often at once entertaining and instructive. They act as flight simulators, allowing to imagine a situation and to prepare for it without having lived through it.

This simulation works because we cannot imagine events without stimulating the same modules in our brain as those activated in actual activity. These simulations help us better manage emotions, and many phobias – air travel, spiders, talking in public, etc. – are treated using a method based on this technique. Simulations also facilitate problem solving. A man who is trying to stop smoking and mentally projects a party during which friends offer him a cigarette – which he refuses – stands a better chance not to give in to temptation. More amazingly, mental simulation can also develop skills. The summary of 35 studies gathering 3,214 participants has shown that sole mental training – sitting quietly, not moving and imagining oneself correctly completing a task from start to finish – significantly improves performances. This has been corroborated for many activities, from welding to ice-skating, as well as darts. However, sole mental training is more efficient for tasks involving more mental activity than physical activity. But overall, mental training alone can produce on average two thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice.

Therefore, if mental simulation is not as beneficial as real practice, it is not far from it. And good stories are mental simulations.

But how can you make up stories that stick? Well, most of the time, you don’t even need to create them: you only have to spot them. How? Chip Heath and Dean Heath have analyzed hundreds of inspiring stories and have concluded that there are three types of elementary plots is these stories: The Challenge, The Bond and Creativity.

The Challenge

A classic of this genre – and even perhaps its archetype – is David against Goliath. A character triumphs over a formidable challenge and wins. There are many other variants, such as the Ugly Little Duckling, the poor man who becomes rich, the triumph of will over adversity.

The key element of these stories is that the hurdles appear insurmountable to the hero, but he ends up triumphant.

These stories inspire us by appealing to our perseverance and courage. They make us want to work hard, to take on new challenges and to overcome obstacles.

The Bond

The archetype of the bonding stories is the Good Samaritan:

“But he, desiring to justify himself, asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?"

Jesus answered, "A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he traveled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, ‘Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.’ Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?"

He said, "He who showed mercy on him."

Then Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise." (Luke 10:30 – 37)

At the time, the Samaritans and the Jews hated each other and there was a social chasm, which seemed to be impassable. This story tells us of people who create a bond by crossing a divide – be it racial, ethnic, social, religious, etc. This plot is ideal for love stories – think of Romeo and Juliet or Titanic.

Creativity

It is present in the story of the apple falling over Isaac Newton’s head, inspiring him the theory of gravity. This plot involves an individual making a revolutionary discovery, solving a very ancient enigma or tackling a problem in an innovating manner. It is the plot of MacGyver or The A-Team.

Chapter 7: Epilogue

In order for a story to stick, it must inspire the following to its audience:

1. Attention
2. Understanding and memorization
3. Adhesion
4. Implication
5. Will to act

These stages are linked to the principles in the following way:

1 – Attention	UNEXPECTED
2 – Understanding and memorization	CONCRETE
3 – Adhesion	CREDIBILITY
4 – Implication	EMOTION
5 – Will to act	STORY

The authors give a list of symptoms to detect the audience’s lack of attention and solutions to solve it.

Critic of the “Made to Stick” :

This book is simple, easy to understand and provides a detailed guide to making ideas stick, in all areas one can imagine, from education to marketing, as well as sales or storytelling. The authors have carried out a survey, which they relate at the start of the book and which indicates that even complete beginners following the book’s precepts manage to create efficient commercials that stick. It is ultra easy to check if our messages can stick and to choose the best one by using this table:

Principles	Message 1	Message 2	Message 3
Simplicity
Unexpected
Concrete
Credibility
Emotion
Story

Use it for yourself!

One of the authors is a scientist – Chip Heath, Professor of psychology at Stanford – and it is obvious: the book is packed with references and notes about scientific surveys, a welcome element and rather rare in business books, which adds credibility to the overall work and allows to go deeper if need be.

As for faults, I found it at times repetitive, and I believe it could have been shorter to stick better. Overall it is an excellent book, which explains its message in a clear and concrete manner, illustrating it with many stories, which are as many examples and images to help us understand better the concepts. To be tried out in our future communications.

Strong points:

• Simple and easy to understand
• Many stories and examples to help us understand the concepts
• Many references to scientific studies
• Provides concrete tools – including the useful table – to improve the impact and the adhesion of our messages

Weak points:

• A little repetitive at times
• Could have been more concise

My rating:

Have you read the book? How do you rate it?

Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

Read more reviews about Made to Stick on Amazon.

Buy “Made to Stick” on Amazon :

Related posts:

1. Made to Stick Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. One sentence-summary: Some...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Note: Because this book is so thick and full of stories, anecdotes and repetition, making it difficut to summarize, I am publishing the summary in two parts. Here is the second. The first part is here. Moreover, certain chapters are somewhat redundant, I skipped the ones that I thought brought little value to the overall work. I have put a concise description in parentheses of each passage to do with the title of these chapters that I don’t necessarily address here.

Part 2 : Survival

When you see someone crying, whether because they are in mourning, or because their son is far away, or because they have lost a possession, be careful not to be carried away with the idea that bad things have befallen them. Remember that in the moment what is affecting them is not the accident, which doesn’t affect anyone but them, but the judgment that they bring to the accident.

Epictitus

• Chapter 9 : Bending the Map (The importance of an appropriate mental model for your surroundings, the 5 stages of loss)

One day in 1998, Ken Killip, a strong and experienced firefighter, took a three day hike with his friend, York, in Rocky Mountain National Park, a huge wild expanse of some 1,000 square kilometers covered with mountains and forests

.

Photo by The Brit 2

Photo by tgrt

They had a specific itinerary to complete of around 10 kilometers with their heavily stuffed packs and one part of their hike took them up to height of 4,000 meters. They were sharing their load and York was carrying the tent. The latter had to regularly wait for Killip who walked less quickly than he did. After five or six hours, he got tired and left Killip behind – people regularly fail to understand that they should travel at the pace of the slowest, not more quickly.

Killip was following York who had been before and knew the way. And while Killip had the map, York had the compass. So when Killip saw York gradually disappear, he did not understand the insidious process that was about to play out.

One type of mental model that people form is a mental map: a schema of the geographic area and what route to take. Killip had formed such a mental map ever since he had left his car. Because he was following York, he did not check his topographic map and it is not a good idea to create a mental map. Now his mind was unconsciously in the middle of creating a mental map of a route from an unknown position to a destination he had never seen before.

He found himself climbing up a slope that he thought was Mount Ida. When he got to the top, he was supposed to find landmarks that York had told him about and would be able to guide himself by, in particular a lake and some rivers of crystal clear water where he could quench his thirst – he had drank the last drop from his water pouch three hours ago. When he got to the top, the lake and the rivers weren’t there, the sun went down and the temperature was slowly falling.

In fact, he was not on top of Mount Ida. He had following a path almost parallel in the beginning, which ended up being further away by more than 5 kilometers to the north. It was the result of a minor geographic error. He should have retraced his steps and tried to find the path. Instead of that he continued on.

The apparently irrational behavior makes sense when you consider the brain’s point of view. The fact of not having a mental map, of trying to create one in an environment where sensory facts have no sense is interpreted as an emergency and triggers a physical – or rather an emotional – reaction. The brain pushes the body to hurry up and get somewhere more quickly, somewhere that corresponds to your mental map, a place that has everything you need to survive.

This is how Killip found himself wandering in a thick forest in total darkness with the horrifying feeling that he didn’t know where he was. By chance, a ray of light lit up a little pond, at which Killip could quench his thirst and fill up his water pouch. He got ready to spend the night there, he had no choice at present. He had food in his pack, but York had the tent. He also had materials to light a fire, but he didn’t. The rules prohibited lighting fires in the park, and Killip, a good fireman, respected the rule. If he had lit a fire he would have been able to find himself more quickly.

When he woke up, he had not yet completely admitted that he was lost. He wandered about all day long, becoming even more lost, because he had expanded his circle of confusion so much that he could no longer retrace his steps. He decided to climb up a hill to see where he was, slipped half way up and slid down the slope, severely wounding his shoulders and his legs. He stopped again beside a small pond, refrained from building a fire even though it was freezing cold, and fell asleep.

When he awoke, he was filled with frustration. He decided to turn back. But he didn’t know where he was and he didn’t know which way he had come. Everything he tried took him deeper into the forest. He tried again to climb up a mountain. But a storm stopped him and sent him back into the forest. He knew his clothes were dirty. He fell asleep again on the slope, with one arm around a tree to avoid slipping. Two days ago he was a perfectly healthy hiker, competent and well equipped, his pack contained what he needed to live for a week in the wild. Now, he was huddled on an icy mountain slope, exhausted, famished, seriously dehydrated, hurt and hypothermic. What started out as a small navigation mistake had progressed, one innocent step at a time, into a fierce fight for survival.

Getting lost is not a matter of the place you are in. It’s a state of mind. It can happen in a forest or it can happen in your life. People know it instinctively.

Research suggests that there are five general stages that a lost person goes through:

1. First, you deny that you are disoriented and you move with a sense of urgency, trying to reconcile your mental map with what you see.
2. Then, when you realize you are lost, the sense of urgency vanishes and becomes a complete urgency to survive. Thinking clearly becomes impossible and actions become frenetic, unproductive and even dangerous.
3. At the third stage, often after getting hurt or exhausted, you develop a strategy to find a place that corresponds to your mental map. It’s a bad strategy, because you don’t have a map; you are lost.
4. You deteriorate both rationally and emotionally as soon as you perceive that your strategy is failing to resolve the conflict.
5. In the final stage, when you are low on options and energy, you become resigned to your difficult situation and accept it for what it is.

Whether you like it or not, you must then make a new mental map of the place where you are. You must become Robinson Crusoe or you will die. To survive, you must find yourself. Then the place you happen to be will not be so important.

These stages for getting lost don’t only apply to hikers in the woods. For example, the Xerox corporation, a multinational American company which made its fortune by selling one of the premier photocopiers, got lost on the road that leads to innovation even though that was the spearhead of the company. Throughout the 70s, when personal information technology was in its infancy, and had barely started spreading through homes, and when computers such as the Apple 2 were driven by command line interfaces in green text on small yet cumbersome screens, Palo Alto Research Center, a laboratory that belonged to Xerox, invented the mouse, the graphic interface, the flat screen and Ethernet, the standard for information technology networks. Veritable treasures, a generation ahead of its time, which could have allowed Xerox to completely dominate the emerging market for computer technology.

But others were to become rich with these inventions. The executive leaders of Xerox, busy with their old mental models, were still worrying about managing paper and photocopiers and did not relate any more to the reality of a world which had changed rapidly, did not see the enormous potential of their discoveries. They left others to profit, notably Apple, and its founder Steve Jobs, who used their ideas to create Lisa, then the famous Macintosh.

Unlike Killip, Xerox is still lost in today’s woods.

Because Killip, after spending his third night in the woods, could no longer honestly deny that he was lost. He could have resigned himself to it, but that is not the path he chose. He built a shelter and lit a fire, something he should have done the first day. He remained in the same place for two days, resting his body, adapting to his environment. He had begun to make a map of his real surroundings rather than imagining the map he wished for. He had discovered the first Rule of Life: Be in the here and now.

At last, a helicopter passed so close that he could have thrown a stone at it. Then it went away. This almost broke his spirit in two. But one of the most difficult stages that survivors must learn is to give up the hope of being rescued, just as you must give up the old world that you have left and accept the new. There is no other way of calming the mind. This might seem paradoxical, but it is essential.

The pilot had seen Killip’s blue parka hanging on a branch, and he sent help to him. He had lost more than 10 kilos in five days (about 22 lbs). The condition of his knees required two surgeries. But he got out of it.

• Chapter 11 : We’re all going to fuckin’ die! (The importance of staying calm and adopting a good attitude for survival)

In January 1982, Steven Callahan was preparing to cross the Atlantic alone on a small boat that he had built himself, setting out from the Canaries on his way to the Caribbean islands. Six days later, in the middle of a storm and in the middle of the night, his boat struck something – perhaps it was a shark, and began to sink. Callahan was woken up by the noise and had just enough time to jump out, without recovering his survival pack, before water got inside the boat. He managed to put on his life jacket in spite of the tall waves and the howling wind, remaining remarkably calm in a very dangerous situation which allowed him to maximize his chances of survival by acting efficiently from the onset of the catastrophe.

On the other side of the Atlantic, three months earlier, a ketch, the Trashman, was busy sinking with 5 people on board after encountering a storm. The ship’s second in command yelled “We’re all going to fuckin’ die! We’re all going to fuckin’ die!” and in his panic he inflated his life jacket without attaching it to the boat. It was carried off on the wind and disappeared forever from sight.

Callahan’s boat took a long time to sink. It was the result of Callahan’s ingenious design which included several reservoirs sealed in the hull. He left his life jacket attached to the boat for a moment wondering what to do next. When he looked at the moon he suddenly noticed how sharp his senses had become. His perceptions had not become narrow with fear, they had been awakened. Obviously, he was afraid and had begun a bitter struggle to get control over his thoughts, but he turned his fear in a focused way towards thinking about survival, the first act of a survivor. He was thinking then in a clear and effective way. He knew that his chances of being spotted and rescued were small. He also knew that the tide was moving towards the west, not the east, which gave him a journey of about 3,000 kilometers. His life jacket contained a survival kit, but the pack that was in the flooded boat contained many more supplies for survival. Then he took a risk; he dived, got to the inside of the boat, cut the strings of the pack and brought it up to the surface with him. He had just risked his life, but he was better equipped for survival now. He made a rational choice and assumed the risks and the rewards.

The account of his survival, which he shares with us in his best seller: Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea, is an example of everything you need to do to survive; stay calm, make decisions and act, accept the situation and understand whether the chances are slim, everything is possible, and do your best, your absolute and total best, to survive.

Many people finding themselves in much less desperate situations than Callahan don’t stay calm and make calamitous mistakes from the beginning, drastically reducing their chances for survival.

So, on the Trashman, all that was left after the life jacket had been carried off on the wind was an inflatable Zodiac (dinghy) which did not have a survival kit. Five people, one of whom was seriously wounded after having been tossed on the rigging by a wave, were in this little semi-rigid dinghy. Other than the wounded one, who was in pain, the team divided quickly into two groups of two people with completely opposing attitudes; one, hysterical, panicked and refusing to face up to the situation, the other calm, accepting the situation and preparing psychologically to do everything in their power to survive, and not only for themselves, but also for all those that loved them and would suffer if they died.

The first group, and the wounded one died. The two others survived.

[ad#ad-bas]

• Chapter 14 : A certain nobility (The need to consider everything right up until the end)

When Solon, a great man in the state of Athens, visited the court of Croesus, the rich king of Lydia, the king showed Solon his enormous wealth and his palace and asked him:

“My dear Athenian guest, we often hear you spoken of here; you are famous for your culture and your voyages, which have taken you far and wide to many different places. What I would like to know is whether you have ever crossed paths with someone who is happier than all others?”

Croesus waited to be named, but Solon gave him the name of an ordinary man, Tellus of Athens.

“You see, in the battle of Eleusis he rushed into a breach and made our enemies turn tail. He died, but his death was splendid, and the Athenians gave him a magnificent public funeral and greatly honored him.”

Croesus was somewhat put out at not being mentioned. Solon then replied to him:

“I am not in a position to tell you what you are asking me to tell you until you are also dead. It is necessary to consider the end of everything, and see how it ends up, because the gods often offer prosperity to men and then destroy them completely and blindly.”

This, then, is the paradox of survival: it is not possible for a man or for a woman to say they have survived and be a perfect survivor until they are dead, because every test is a preparation for the next. Survival is a path that must be followed from birth until death.

• Appendix : The rules of adventure

At this point you could look over everything that has been written and wonder: this is all very well, but what am I doing right now?

The book was not designed to tell people what to do in critical situations but rather to allow research for a better understanding that will allow them to know what to do when the moment arrives – and it always comes one way or another.

None-the-less, Laurence Gonzales offers some suggestions that can help in any difficult situation, not just catastrophes and accidents.

To avoid getting into difficult situations:

• Notice, believe, and then act

Avoiding accidents is intrinsically tied to the fact of being intelligent. Neurobiologist Horace Barlow says that intelligence is the fact of “guessing well.” Training is an attempt to make more accurate predictions about your surroundings. But if your surroundings change, you will need to be open and polyvalent, and have the ability to notice what is really happening and adapt to it. Therefore training and prediction might not be your best friends.

In Kendo – a martial art involving sword fighting, the practitioner must not anticipate his opponent’s movements or give free rein to the tendency to predict, because if his opponent does not act in accordance with his predictions, it could lead to surprise, and then momentary confusion, and thus a sudden death. Instead, he must keep his eyes open, remain clear and calm, and act at a decisive moment. Kendo teaches concentration, precise control of the body, courtesy, humility and confidence in yourself. These are similar to the qualities you need when you meet with the forces of nature.

Those who avoid accidents and those who see the world clearly see it change, and change their behavior as a result.

• Avoid impulsive behavior; don’t rush

Catecholamines are a double-edged sword. They give you power when you need an energy boost, but they can also excite you to the point where you make mistakes. Don’t be the skier or the snow-mobiler who takes a slope that is prone to avalanches just because it is a wonderful day and the beauty excites you.

• Know your business

As the philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius put it: “For every particular thing, ask yourself: What is on the inside, how is it constructed?” A deep knowledge of the world that surrounds you could save your life.

• Get information

The same accidents happen again and again, year after year. Do internet research. Ask people who know. Game wardens, rescue workers and local authorities will be happy to inform you.

• Be humble

A Navy commander told Al Siebert, a psychologist who studies survivors, that “the Rambo type are the first to go.” Don’t only think that just because you are good at one thing you are good at something else. The other principle is that experience endangers success, “this lamp that lights up our backs.” The beginner has a more open mind on what could happen than an expert. Those who manage to gain experience while keeping the mind of a beginner become long term survivors.

• If in doubt, don’t

This is a difficult piece of advice. You have bought your ticket. You have waited all year for this trip. You have bought all the equipment you need. It is difficult to admit that things don’t happen as expected. During these times, it is good to ask yourself if this is worth dying for.

To better manage difficult situations when they arise:

1. Notice, believe. Be attentive to your new surroundings, accept them as well as the consequences that occur.
2. Stay calm. Use humor to focus your fear. Survivors keep their sense of humor and therefore their cool. They use fear rather than being guided by it.
3. Think/analyze/plan. Stay organized. Identify small manageable tasks. Survivors get organized quickly, define routines and instill discipline.
4. Take decisive and appropriate actions. Be both brave and wise when you identify tasks. Survivors are ready to take risks to save themselves and others.
5. Celebrate your success. Take joy in accomplishing tasks. It is a very important step in order to create a sense of motivation and not fall into hopeless depression.
6. Consider yourself happy. Recognize it – you are alive. That’s how survivors become survivors and not victims. They always have someone else to help, even if they are not present.
7. Play. Sing, play mind games, recite poetry, count whatever you like, do math problems in your mind.
8. See the beauty. Survivors are sensitive to the wonders of the world. Beauty appreciation, the feeling of seeing something great, awakens your senses, reduces stress and greatly increases your motivation.
9. Believe that you will succeed. Develop a deep conviction that you are going to live.
10. Surrender. Let go of the fear of dying and accept it. Resign yourself without giving up.
11. Do everything necessary. Be determined. Have the will and the skills. Survivors have a meta-knowledge: they know their abilities and don’t overestimate or underestimate them.
12. Never give up. Don’t let anything break your spirit.

Book Summary:

This book is unique in the sense that it contains an excellent book hidden inside. You need to find it, and assemble it piece by piece yourself, perhaps in an amusing attempt to create a seemingly interactive Web 2.0 version of an old paper book. Actually, this book is thick, crammed, poorly structured, and hides the heart of its messages among numerous true stories, messages that are more or less repeated throughout the book from different angles. The storytelling side is interesting because it allows concepts to be presented well, but it becomes somewhat indigestible by virtue of telling us these stories over and over. Moreover, the author, a journalist by profession, ventures into very difficult scientific territory – like chaos theory or auto-organization – which he doesn’t seem to have totally mastered, even if his attempt is praiseworthy.

The book is written simply and reads easily, but it could benefit by being cut in half and condensing the format around the heart of the author’s ideas. And his ideas are, undeniably, worth the detour. Because what Laurence Gonzales gives us here is a survival philosophy and an extremely interesting analysis of the way the brain and mind work in emergency situations, which goes well beyond catastrophes to other physical accidents which can affect us. He describes the state of mind that separates those who survive from those who die. He describes the importance of mental models, of a positive mental attitude, the effects of stress and the absolute necessity of understanding the paradox: to survive you must surrender without giving in, that is to say, fully accept the reality in all its horror and never give up the will to survive. That allows you to quickly adapt to the situation rather than wallow in denial. And that helps you to dedicate yourself to the present moment, as the author describes it in the passages are reminiscent of certain passages of The Art of Meditation.

This book, despite its form that might lose some people, is therefore immensely interesting and allows people to learn many things about the way the mind works, and the attitude to adopt to get out of all sorts of prickly situations. And who knows, perhaps it will be useful to you one day to get out of a situation where your life is in danger?

Strong points:

• Philosophy and psychology of survival
• Universal subject that applies to every delicate situation in spite of its focus on catastrophes
• Much interesting information on the the way the brain works, the role of certain hormones, and the way they function in crisis situations
• Numerous stories illustrating the author’s points

Weak points:

• Thick and crammed, needlessly long
• Numerous repetition
• A bit too full of stories for my liking
• The author ventures into territory that is not an expert in, like chaos theory

Translated by www.DeansResource.com

My rating:

Add one star if you are in a risky profession or practice a risky sport.

Have you read this book ? How do you rate it ?

Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

Read more reviews about Deep Survival on Amazon.

PMBA Challenge:

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

One sentence summary: In extraordinary circumstances, like accidents or catastrophes, some people survive and others die, such that sometimes things lead you to believe that the first ones die and the second ones survive; this book explains, using numerous stories of accidents and catastrophes, and by exploring the latest scientific theories – from neuroscience to the theory of chaos – what makes one person die and another survive.

By Laurence Gonzales, 2003, 295 pages.

Summary and book review:

The author begins by telling us the story of his father, a B17 bomber pilot – the flying fortress – during the Second World War. While conducting a raid on Dusseldorf, his plane was hit in midair by a shot from a German flak, which cut the left wing in two and killed nine crew members on the spot – out of ten. With his plane spinning around, pinned by centrifugal force, seriously wounded, he failed to grab his parachute and jump. He remained imprisoned in the cockpit for a six kilometer descent while the plane was cut in two. Then he fainted. When he came to, he was on the ground, and looked out at the world through the shattered window of the cockpit. He whole body was in agony, and a piece of the cockpit had penetrated his leg. A German farmer was standing in front of him, his gun pointed at him – at that time, they did not hesitate to kill American pilots from time to time. The German fired.

He survived. He was taken to a prisoner camp, then freed at the end of the war.

Laurence Gonzales’ interest in survival began when his father told him his story. The fact that he lived while so many others died fascinated him, and he wanted to understand, with the help of his interest in science. When five people were shipwrecked and only two came home, what was it that made the difference? Who survived the Nazi camps? Why did Robert Falcon Scott die during his expedition to the North Pole and Roald Amundsen survive? Why was a 17 year old adolescent girl the sole survivor to escape in the Peruvian jungle, while the adult victims with her in an air crash died? Why can some people survive the worst psychological catastrophes, like divorce, death, layoff, serious illness, while others suffer terribly? In his quest, he discovered principles that he tells us about in his book. Follow the guide.

Part 1 : How accidents happen

• Chapter 1: Look out, here comes Ray Charles (The impact of emotion on our actions and how they are the cause of certain mistakes, the impact of fear and the effectiveness of humor)

Shortly before the author reached the American aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, an important step in his quest that was leading him to explore the frontier between life and death – frontier because some people succeed and others fail – a pilot was in the middle of landing, a normal sort of thing on such a boat. But his approach was too low. And many signals were indicating that to him, both in his cockpit and on the runway – the landing officer had turned on large red lights which meant your approach is not good, you should not land! And of course he yelled into his microphone, his voice echoing in the pilot’s helmet. But the latter continued, even though he only had to push down a fraction of an inch on the throttle to take off again and try a new approach.

The impact of the tail against the aircraft carrier cut the plane in two, and sent the pilot ricocheting off the runway in a shower of sparks, still clinging to his seat.

He survived. That was not the end of the story, that is not where the frontier is. The frontier can be found in this question: What was he thinking? He was intelligent, well prepared and had undergone extremely rigorous training. Something powerful blocked him. Something strong enough to continue trying to hit the runway even though all signals indicated that he wouldn’t make it. This reminded Laurence Gonzales of numerous accidents in dangerous sports like canyoneering which happened because people were ignoring the obvious signs for some inexplicable reason. It is this mystery that the author was trying to solve.

What the pilots of the Carl Vinson know, is that some time issues come up. There are things that you cannot control and you would be better off knowing how you are going to react to them.

The first rule is: face up to reality. Good survivors are not immune to fear. They know what is happening and fear permeates them completely. The whole question is what they do right afterwards.

When a pilot takes the controls of a plane and soars off the runway, he is often in a state of advanced excitement. Flying is his passion and sometimes he only lives for that. Every flight is a pure moment of joy and happiness, even though he is piloting several tons of a highly unstable machine that is full of explosive fuel where the slightest mistake could be fatal. They take a calculated risk just as snowboarders do before taking off from the top of a mountain, alpine climbers, parachutists and numerous other sports.

At times like that, people are not really totally present. They are each in a state of perception, of awareness, of memory and of deeply altered emotion.

Today, scientific studies tell us that emotions are an instinctive response designed for survival. These are faster than intellect, and occur due to many physical changes which are preparations for action. The nervous system becomes more energetic, blood changes its chemistry so that it coagulates more quickly, digestion stops, and numerous chemicals are sent in the blood to help the body become ready for everything that must be done. Reason is hesitant, slow and fallible, while emotions are sure, rapid and unhesitating.

There are primary and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are those you are born with, like the need to search for food or the sudden desire to catch something when you feel it falling. And the emotional system can get hung up on anything and everything. If you are a soldier at war, evolution has not formed your brain to throw you to the ground at the slightest gunshot. But once you have made a connection between gunshots and the risk of death, this connection becomes so deep that you don’t even need to think when it happens; your reaction is automatic. These are secondary emotions: connections between things and primary emotions that make reactions automatic.

Fear is a very powerful emotion. During a fear reaction, amygdale in the brain – as opposed to throat amygdale – helps to put in motion a series of incredible, complex events designed to produce a reaction that aids survival, bypassing the intellect. For example, if you are walking up a mountain path and notice something on the ground that looks like a snake, you will stop dead before you have even really registered what is on the ground because the strategy that evolution has fashioned with amygdale is “better be safe than sorry.” Then the neocortex takes over and tells you whether you are looking at a simple stick or an actual snake.

Many pilots, therefore, experience fear when they are in the landing stage – taking off is optional, but landing is a must – and fear in the cockpit is like knights dueling in a telephone booth. Pilots out of necessity develop a very strong secondary emotion associating safety, and even ecstasy with the ground – or the flight deck – and the overwhelming feeling that if only they can get this thing on the ground they will be safe and sound. A pilot develops a physical memory of this feeling, which is a powerful driving force for action coupled with direct experience with a primary emotion. He also has intellectual know-how telling him that if he tries to land, if it is too low or too slow, he could die. Unfortunately, he has no secondary emotions linked to that event since he has never experienced it. It is an abstract concept which cannot fight on equal terms to become a driving force to act upon.

So fear is often a stress trigger. In the case of stress, the brain secretes cortisol, which has many effects, one of the most important being the fact that it erodes our ability to perceive things and constrains our field of vision by targeting only what we think are the most important. And sometimes these are not good things. Therefore sometimes a pilot focuses too much on what he feels is the most important thing: the landing strip. His home. And thus the pilot of the Carl Vinson very well may not have heard the voice of the landing officer and not seen the red lights on the bridge. His body was doing what it knew was best for him: escaping the danger and getting to safety as quickly as possible. The rest of the environment became uninteresting noise efficiently filtered out by his brain.

So he hit the carrier.

• Chapter 4 : A gorilla in our midst (How the brain filters reality, mental models, and the limits of working memory)

As complex as the brain is, the world is even more so. The brain cannot deal with and organize all the facts it receives. It could not define a reasonable plan of action if everything was treated equally and perceived with the same intensity. Thus, the brain must simplify reality and only perceive a part of it in order to be able to deal with it, otherwise it would cave under the weight of the complexity. This is what is difficult about logic: it happens step by step in a linear manner. Reality is not linear.

The brain’s role with respect to reality is similar to that of a search engine with respect to millions of pages that it finds on the internet. Without a powerful search engine you are paralyzed.

One of the brain’s search engines involves emotional book-marks, in which emotions help to direct logic and direct reason towards a place where they can do useful work. A second strategy that the brain uses to manage complicated problems is to create mental models, simplified schema of reality. A mental model can tell you what the rules are for a particular environment or the color and shape of a familiar object.

Magicians use this creation of a temporary mental model in their most subtle tricks, a short term memory of the world. Every world model has its own underlying assumptions based on experience, memory, secondary emotions and emotional book marks, which influence our expectations and what we see and what we plan to do about it. The magician creates a world model then passes from one model to another so quickly that you remain stuck in the first model, and you are surprised by the new reality he shows you. It is the disconnect between the first model and the second model that is surprising. You believe that it’s the magician doing the trick, but in fact you are doing it yourself.

One of the reasons why magic tricks work can be explained by the working memory. The working memory is a temporary memory which manages what we are doing at the moment. It can only manage a few things at one time, maybe half a dozen or so, when new things require our attention, these elements are forgotten. The working memory can also use information from long term memory. The fact that you are able to read this long sentence is the result of your short term memory which is capable of remembering the beginning, the middle and the end of the sentence, while using definitions and associations coming from your long term memory to understand the meaning of the words. It is also the result of the fact that you have created mental models of the words, you have associated to the symbol – the word – a meaning, an image of reality. When you read camel you immediately think of a camel, if you have ever seen a picture of that animal. If you have never seen a picture of that animal, then the meaning that you attribute to this word will depend on knowledge that you have acquired about this subject – perhaps you will classify it in the general category of “animal,” you might associate it with the desert or put it simply in the case of “I don’t know what it is” – and you do this in an instant.

The fact that new information – and in particular emotionally laden information – forces things to leave our working memory means that we cannot pay attention to many things at once. Unless something is transferred successfully to our long term memory, it is lost.

Working memory is therefore our attention. Its limited nature, together with the inevitable failings of the mental models, can cause surprising deficiencies in the way in which we comprehend reality and make conscious or unconscious decisions.

[ad#ad-bas]

• Chapter 5 : Anatomy of an Act of God (the need for humility, the cause for mistakes)

If you distill all the cognitive sciences, psychology and neurosciences over the last hundred years, you will find that we are always Homo but only sometimes Sapiens. We are emotional creatures, which is to say physical creatures. Neurologist Joseph Ledoux concluded that “people do all sorts of things for reasons they are not conscious of…and that is one of the principal jobs of the conscience to make our lives have a coherent manner, in a self concept.” Therefore, each of us is the hero in our own movie.

It is therefore not surprising to note that in many cases the mechanisms underlying survival, which are directly wired in us and sculpted by experience, are revealed not only to be powerful motivation elements pushing us to action, but also work to their maximum which they short circuit conscious mechanisms. Once an emotional reaction has taken hold, this can lead to an imperious desire to act.

But there are many ways to revise the script and adapt to dangerous situations. Training is one. All performers at the top of their profession train hard, and if you follow in their footsteps you are interested in being well trained as well. If we are beginners, we are confronted in mother nature with the same level of difficulty as the experts: she does not adapt herself to our level.

The practice of Zen teaches us that it is impossible to add anything to a teacup filled with water. The same thing is true of our mind. A closed attitude that says “I already know that” can lead us to miss important information. Zen teaches openness. Survival teachers refer to it when they talk about “humility.” Generally, highly skilled performers such as professional rescue personnel have an exceptional personal balance between bravery and humility.

Just being aware of nature’s pitfalls can help; it helps us remember that we are primates with a recent new functionality that is only somewhat tested; the neocortex. What we see as failings in the mind are probably nothing more than nature’s process which is quietly tinkering with simple rules over a long period of evolutionary time. Nature always uses plenty of individuals of all species in her experiments, and we are her ultimate experiment. It’s nothing personal then, when our brains play tricks on us. It’s nothing personal either when we die, as Marc-Aurèle, the philosopher emperor put it.

• Chapter 6 : The sand pile effect (Accidents as a natural effect of systems)

What we call “accidents” do not happen by themselves. People must assemble the framework that makes them happen. Furthermore, nothing can stay happening for a long time. That is how mountains can have the reputation for being easy and well suited for beginning climbers. However accidents do happen, often involving experienced people who have climbed much more difficult mountains.

It was like this in 2002 that a drama unfolded on Mount Hood, a supposedly easy mountain in Oregon. 4 mountain climbers, one of whom was very experienced, arrived at the summit. After enjoying the view, they began their descent, all attached to the same cord, the novice at the bottom and the most experienced at the top. They did not use pitons to attach the cord, it was attached to them. The cord helped hold someone if they fell, but only on condition that the person at the top did not fall. Effectively, the distance between the climbers could be 10 meters (about 32 feet), so that if the person at the top fell, the second would absorb the impact when the first falls 20 meters (twice as long as the cord between the two of them), leading to an impact of such force that the second person would have to fall, and so on. That is why the most experienced person is at the top. They are not supposed to fall.

So on that day, Ward, the experienced mountain climber, slipped and fell. He led the other three in his fall, and this fine group led another two climbers who were down below them, then three more who were making their ascent. The nine of them fell into a crevice. Three died, including Ward.

This kind of accident must happen, as is always the case, to someone somewhere. All the available theories tell us that it is an inevitable part of the system at large that puts climbers on snow-covered slopes in large numbers. In his book Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow defends the idea that in certain types of systems big accidents, while rare, are both normal and inevitable. Accidents are a characteristic of the system itself.

Mountain climbers roped themselves in a team without belaying to anchor themselves all the time. They use axes for support poles while they descend

.

Photo par massimobottelli

The accident on Mount Hood involved two big categories of effects: the mechanical system that the climbers were using and the psychology and physiology that contributed to the accident.

In system accidents, unexpected interactions between forces and components are generated naturally by the complexity of the system. This type of accident is made up of conditions, judgments, acts and events that would be inconsequential by themselves; at least if they were not associated with “right time” and “right place,” they would pass unnoticed. So Ward had slipped in the past, but he had always managed to catch himself before a fatal fall. He had also already belayed, but without ever falling to the point of it being useful to him. Thus Charles Perrow observed that most of the time, nothing serious happens, which leads operators – in this case climbers – to believe that the behavior of the system that they see is the only possible state of the system.

When a system is tightly coupled, its effects can expand in an exponential manner. In a system that is loosely coupled or uncoupled, the effects don’t affect other parts of the system. Therefore in a closely arranged row of dominoes there is a strong relationship between the state of an individual domino and the state of all the dominoes: if one falls, all the others will be affected. But if the dominoes are sufficiently well spaced, if one falls there won’t be any consequences for the others.

If the climbers were not attached to each other, the consequences of Ward’s fall would have been much less dramatic. But the accident was, however, no-one’s fault. It was a logical consequence of the self-directed system. So the Mount Hood accident was predictable, but no-one could know which mountain climbers were going to fall, nor where, nor when, nor with what injuries. The climbers were familiar with the system and had a good idea of how it worked, but only of its most common states. This type of huge accident, when it happens, happens very fast and can’t be stopped.

• Chapter 7 : The rules of life (psychological causes of accidents)

There are two environments, two worlds, on Mount Hood. One is designed for the survival and comfort of humans. The other is not. There are mechanical chair lifts, pavilions, and a five star restaurant with its pinot noir and its rosemary crostini. In that place you can look out over thousands of square meters of natural wilderness while sipping your white wine, with an indifference more impudent than any animal would dare to entertain. The mountain is safely contained behind double-paned glass.

But we can only reign over our little model of the world. It is easy to cross this invisible line between that which has been adapted for us and that which requires that we adapt to it. But it is also easy to forget and bring with us this false sense of security that can be fatal for us when we cross the line. So the nine mountain climbers could have taken a little bit of this attitude with them from the pavilion to the mountain. Their success in life, their objectives, their plans and their imaginations took them there. They earned money to do this sort of thing. They earned the reward that their life mastery had bought them. People are part of a mechanical system but they are also a system in themselves.

Risk homeostasis theory states that people accept a certain level of risk and the more you perceive the environment as less risky, the more risks you take and vice versa. Therefore when the ABS breaking system was introduced in cars, the number of accidents overall remained the same because drivers who had them felt safer and took more risks. In the same way, the mountain climbers who have tackled reputedly dangerous mountains with maximum precaution, have a tendency to relax when they are climbing on reputedly safer mountains.

So, as Heraclite put is over 2500 years ago now, “every time we enter a river, it’s a different river.” And every time you hike on Mount Hood, it’s a different mountain. Studies of mountain accidents show that there are three factors that contributed to Mount Hood: 1) the descent, 2) everyone was roped together and 3) no belay. These three factors mean that on a global scale, accidents similar to the one on Mount Hood are very common.

There are three difficulties with the descent:

1. Attitude
2. An emotion tied to reaching a goal
3. Stress

In the first place, the climbers, like many, had celebrated their arrival at the summit. “It was a glorious morning,” one of them recounted, “we had fun up there for half an hour, cracking jokes.” Humor. The tool that gives vent to emotional response. The pitfall they were up against was that they were only half way there. They partied even though the hardest part still awaited them. Mountain climbers are the only athletes to do that. So, it’s a natural part of the cycle of human emotions to let down your guard once you have reached a goal.

So the climbers were at the summit and faced the descent with the 5 star restaurant below them. Suddenly, the positive state of celebration upon arriving at the summit was transformed into the perspective of slowly descending the length of the long slope. Images of previous experiences popped into the minds of all the climbers: they saw themselves sitting quietly in the warm, resting. They saw rest and safety within their grasp: they only had to get down quickly and reach the pavilion as quickly as possible (a warm shower, pinot noir, rosemary crostini). So securing themselves by belaying would be long, annoying and tiring. They were already tired, and had already spent a lot of time climbing. A succession of emotional book marks had already been etched in their minds and one of the book marks reminded them that is was enough to go down one foot in front of the other for safety. Another told them that belaying would mean prolonged pain, thirst, hunger and fatigue. And they had no emotional book mark tied to falling 300 meters, or for the energy that would build up with a rope system if the highest climber fell.

So they had a false sense of security, due to the fact that Mount Hood is reputedly easy, of Ward’s experience, and by the training in self-arrest that they had successfully carried out the day before, and by their discussions on what behaviors to adopt to secure their descent.

Thus, piece by piece, unconscious of the fact that their model of the world was no longer valid, they assembled their accident. And they began the process long before their arrival at Mount Hood.

This kind of accident has to happen. But it does not have to happen for you and me.

More in the next episode .

Read more reviews of Deep Survival on Amazon.

Translated by www.DeansResource.com

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

One Sentence Summary: To make friends, influence others and get them in our corner, it is important to know how to look after their ego; this happens after an important change in our everyday behavior, which consists of never criticizing, being genuinely interested in others, smiling, remembering the first name of the person we are speaking with, making them feel important, never telling them they are wrong, talking about our own mistakes before talking about theirs, motivating, sincerely complimenting, and generally always looking after their self esteem.

By Dale Canergie, 1936 (first edition), 1981 (most recently revised edition), 250 pages.

Summary and Book Review:

After GTD, this book is the second best seller of my crazy personal MBA challenge and it is certainly one of the best known. It has sold over 45 million copies around the world since it was first published – a modest printing run of five thousand copies – in 1936. The book has undergone several revisions since the death of the author in 1955, primarily by his wife and his daughter in order to update examples given by the author about famous personalities who were known in 1936 but forgotten since – without changing the heart of the book itself.

The author starts out by entrusting us with 8 rules for getting the best out of the book, which seem to me to be highly relevant and applicable to any number of non-fiction books:

1. Have a great desire for learning and applying the principles that drive communications and relationships between human beings.
2. Read every chapter twice before going on to the next one.
3. Interrupt our readings frequently to ask ourselves about our personal possibilities for applying every principle.
4. Underline the important ideas.
5. Re-read the book every month.
6. Practice the principles whenever the opportunity presents itself.
7. Transform the book into a fun game: ask our friends to pay a penalty whenever they surprise us by breaking the rules.
8. Monitor the progress that we make each week. Ask ourselves what mistakes we have made, what progress we have made, what lessons we have learned.

Part One: Three fundamental techniques for handling people

• Chapter 1: If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive

In 1931, Francis “Two Guns” Crowley, a gangster and assassin who was known for having killed a police officer in cold blood after he asked him for his driving license, was arrested in his girlfriend’s apartment after a siege in which one hundred police officers were mobilized! He was taken alive, but, believing he was as good as dead, he had taken the time to write a letter. Was it a letter of repentance, a letter of remorse for the crimes he had committed? No, it said “Under my jacket beats a weary heart, but a good one that would not hurt anyone.”

He was condemned to the electric chair. When he arrived at the execution chamber, was he full of excuses, did he declare that he was experiencing remorse? No. He said “This is my punishment for wanting to defend myself.”

Al Capone, the most notorious gangster of all time, himself said: “I have spent the best years of my life giving pleasure to people and amusing them, and what has been my reward? Insults and the life of a hunted man.” Often, gangsters, criminals and wrongdoers justify their behavior with a whole lot of logical or fallacious reasoning.

If criminals as notorious as Francis Crowley or Al Capone consider themselves innocent, what do the people we meet every day who are just like you and me think of themselves?

This is a universal law that is sometimes difficult to accept: 99 times out of 100, man considers himself innocent, no matter how serious his crime. Criticism is therefore useless because it puts the individual on the defensive and forces him to justify himself, and it is dangerous because it damages their self esteem and causes bitterness. Criticism is like a carrier pigeon: the person we want to blame and correct will do anything to justify himself and will condemn us in return. Or, often, they exclaim: “I don’t see how I could have acted any differently!”

When you study the lives of those considered great leaders of men, like Abraham Lincoln – who Dale Carnegie studied in a very thorough manner, even wrote a biography, Lincoln the Unknown – you generally notice that they handle criticism with extreme caution and do everything to preserve the self esteem of those they reproach.

Rather than condemn people, it is better to try and understand them, to discover the motive for their actions. This is much nicer and more productive than criticizing, and it makes us more tolerant, understanding, and good.

Principal # 1: Don’t criticize, don’t condemn and don’t complain

• Chapter 2 : The big secret of dealing with people

There is only one way in the world to get someone to do something: you must excite in them the desire to do it. Obviously, it is always possible to use force, authority or blackmail, but these methods have way more disadvantages than advantages. It is only by giving you what you want that I will manage to get you to do something.

So, what are our needs? In a list that somewhat resembles Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Dale Carnegie lists the different needs that we claim with ceaseless insistence:

1. Health and preservation of life
2. Food
3. Sleep
4. Money and the means to procure it
5. Future survival
6. Sexual satisfaction
7. Our children’s happiness
8. A sense of being important

Very often, most of these needs are met, but there is one that is rarely satisfied, because it is just as deep, and just a imperative as hunger. It is what Freud referred to as “the desire to be recognized,” what William James talks about as “the deepest principal of human nature,” and that is the thirst for appreciation, recognition, to be considered important. This desire distinguishes man from the animals, in which it does not exist.

It is this desire for importance that has driven many men who were poor at birth, to realize a glorious destiny, like Lincoln, Dickens or Rockefeller, it is this desire that drives men to buy cars that are too big for their needs or a house that is much to huge for them.

Tell me how you fulfill this need, and I will tell you who you are. The way in which we fill this need is one of the traits that best characterizes our personality. Some people fulfill it by turning to crime, like the notorious French Bonnot Gang, others write great works of literature, or build commercial empires or help others with all their might, until their dying breath. History is full of amusing details about famous people who try to show their importance, from George Washington, who demanded to be called the “Greatest President of the United States,” to Victor Hugo who wanted to donate his name to the city of Paris.

Note: And you just have to stroll through the Père Lachaise cemetery and read the epitaphs to understand that this need for importance accompanied many men even in death.

So, what is the best way to give a person the importance they seek so much? It is by complimenting them. It is not a matter here of flattery, false or otherwise, which is dangerous and often ends up coming back to bite the sycophant. It is a matter of a new mental attitude, of a new way of life: finding the good qualities in others and sincerely complimenting them, making them aware of the admiration we have for them. Sincere praise is the honey of human relations – everyone seeks it and deeply appreciates it.

Principal # 2: Compliment sincerely and honestly

• Chapter 3: He who can do this this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way

Why are we always talking about what we want? It’s vain, childish and absurd. Obviously, each of us is interested in what we want. We will be interested in it for eternity. But we will be the only ones thinking about it. Everyone else is just like us in this regard and worry only about what they think.

That’s why the only way to influence your neighbor is to talk to him about what he wants and show him that he can get it.

This is the secret of success: putting yourself in someone else’s place and thinking about things from both his point of view and ours. Because action is born out of our fundamental desires, and to influence others you must first excite in them an ardent desire to act.

Principal # 3: Motivate often to do what you propose.

Part Two: Six ways to make people like you

• Chapter 4: Do this and you’ll be welcome anywhere

Do you like dogs? If you do, why? Does it by any chance have something to do with the fact dogs are completely loyal, love you spontaneously and sincerely, and make a big fuss over you when you come home? Do you like it when they jump up on you wagging their tail, with their tongue hanging out, before the door is fully open, losing themselves completely in welcoming you?

We all know people who try their whole lives to get people interested in them. Wasted effort! People are only interested in themselves. They think about themselves morning, noon and night. When you look at a photo of a group that you are part of, who do you look at first?

If you want people to be interested in you, you must first be interested in them. Whether we are a beggar or a king, we like those who admire us.

Do you want people to like you? Then write down anniversaries on your calendar and send a card, welcome people with warmth and enthusiasm on the telephone, show your admiration and your sincere interest when opportunity presents itself. Publius Syrus said it over two thousand years ago:

We are interested in others when they are interested in us.

As with all the advice in this book, this must be applied with total sincerity. This way you might even touch the the heart of the most powerful and unreachable person.

Principal # 4: Be genuinely interested in others

• Chapter 5 : A simple way to make a good first impression

Actions speak louder than words. A smile says: “I like you,” “I am happy to see you,” “Your presence makes me happy,” etc. Obviously, it needs to be a sincere, wide and spontaneous smile that seduces and comforts, not a mechanical and false smile that irritates instead of pleasing.

The most striking example of the effect of a sincere smile is the smile of a child :

.

Photo by Julien Lagarde

Often it communicates to us and can change our grimmest mood in an instant, whenever we smile back.

A smile is so important that it is can also be heard in our voice. Your telephone voice will change if you smile; try it and see

Try this: For one week, once an hour, smile your widest, sincerest smile possible, be nice to others, appreciate their company, because we must be happy in the company of our peers if we want them to be happy in ours. If this is difficult for you, tell yourself that it is just one week and you can stop after that if you don’t like it

Principal # 5 : Have a smile

• Chapter 6 : If you don’t do this you are headed for trouble

James Farley, a famous American politician, has succeeded in becoming a cornerstone of American politics, depended on for decades, even though he was born to a poor family of farmers, even though he lost his father at age 10 and had to start working at that age on a construction site, pushing wheelbarrows full sand and letting bricks dry in the sun. When Dale Carnegie asked him his secret, he replied that he could remember the first name of over five thousand people, as well as the details of each of their lives.

He was Roosevelt’s electoral agent. He had a simple and remarkable system: whenever he met a new person he researched their first and last name – with its exact spelling – and carefully engraved the details in his mind, then he was able to greet this person by his first name by cross-referencing them later – sometimes years later.

Jim Farley knew that everyone likes his own name better than any other name on earth. If you can remember someone’s name, you pay its owner a subtle and appreciated compliment. But if you forget it, mispronounce it or misspell it, you might upset someone or greatly displease them. Men are proud of their name and try to perpetuate it at all costs.

In general, if we forget names, it’s because we simply don’t take the time to write them down, repeat them, and engrave them permanently in our minds. This takes work and requires a certain amount of time, but the reward is definitely worth the effort.

Principal # 6: Remember a person’s name so that they are important

• Chapter 7 : An easy way to become a good conversationalist

How do you succeed with the person you are talking with? How do you convince him and reach a good understanding with him? It’s no mystery: to win someone over, put him in a good mood, and get him in your corner, you must give him your full attention when he expresses himself. Nothing is more flattering.

To do this, you must know how to listen sincerely, and show it.

This also works with unhappy people, including customers. Often, unhappy customers who complain are deeply hurt themselves because someone has made them feel one way or another that they are not important. If you succeed in showing them that they are important in your eyes, then often their complaint will go away by itself.

On the other hand, if you want to know what to do to get people to run from you, mock you behind you back, or despise you, it’s easy: don’t listen to what other people say; only talk about yourself. If an idea comes to you when someone else is talking, don’t wait until they are finished. What good will it do anyway? In any case, what they are saying can’t be as interesting and brilliant as what you are going to say. Go on, really, cut them off mid-sentence.

But if you want your conversation to be appreciated, learn how to listen: to be interesting, be interested. Ask stimulating, agreeable questions, ask them about their life, what they have done. Remember that the person you are talking to is a hundred times more interested in his toothache than in the famine that was responsible for thousands of deaths in China.

Principal # 7: Learn to listen. Encourage others to talk about themselves

• Chapter 8 : How to get people to like you instantly

To find the way to man’s heart you must bring him what he prizes the most

To discover what interests someone, what he is passionate about, all you have to do is stop and listen with interest while he explains to you everything you want to know.

Principal # 8 : Talk to people about what they are interested in

• Chapter 9 : How to make people like you instantly

There is a primordial law that we must respect in our relationships with others. If we observe it, we will win friendship and happiness. If we violate it, we will give rise to numerous difficulties in our wake. Here it is: Make others feel important.

You respect those around you, you wish them to do justice to your merits, and you like very much feeling important in your own circle. You hate excessive flattery, but adore sincere praise, you want to be respected, encouraged, complimented. We all aspire to that.

Principal 9 : Make others feel important and do it sincerely

Part Three: Twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking

• Chapter 10 : You can’t win an argument

In his youth, Dale Carnegie adored controversy.

He studied logic and argument in college, never missed the opportunity to participate in contradictory debates, and even directed a dialectic course as a result, and made the project about writing on a subject… Then, after having attended and participated in thousands of discussions, he analyzed them and drew one conclusion: the best way to carry on a controversy is to avoid it. Nine times out of ten, everyone leaves the debate being even more certain that they are right.

Effectively, nobody wins these battles! Because if you lose, you lose and if you win, you also lose because you have proven to your adversary that he is wrong, you have made him feel inferior, you have hurt his self esteem and his pride. So,

A man convinced against his will
Always keeps his own opinion.

You must therefore choose: a spectacular and theoretic triumphant, or sincere agreement. The two rarely go together. You may well be right, a hundred times right, if you have to fight prove it and change your adversaries mind, your efforts will as useless as if you were wrong.

But what should you do then if there is disagreement? The idea is to welcome the dispute. The dispute is an opportunity to enrich yourself, to discover a new point of view that had not occurred to you before. Here is advice in such a situation:

• Don’t give in to your first impulse.
• Overcome your anger.
• Begin by listening.
• Find common ground.
• Be honest.
• Promise to think about the ideas of your adversaries, and study them carefully.
• Sincerely thank your adversaries for their interest.
• Adjourn your actions to allow both parties present the time to examine the problem in detail.

Principal # 10: Avoid controversy, unless you can come out on top.

[ad#ad-bas]

• Chapter 11: A sure way of making enemies and how to avoid it.

When Theodore Roosevelt was the President of the United States, he admitted that he couldn’t be sure he was right more than 75% of the time. That was the outer limit of his potential. If that is the degree that such a successful man could attain, then what is it for you and me?

Actually, if we could be sure of being right even 50% of the time, all that would be left to do would be to install ourselves on Wall Street and earn a million dollars a day. But if we can’t achieve this percentage, why do we allow ourselves to state that others are wrong?

So don’t ever begin a sentence with “I will prove that to you” or “I can show that…” because that comes out as “I am smarter than you, and I am going to change your mind,” that can only hurt someone’s self esteem without changing their mind. It is actually difficult, even under favorable conditions, to change other people’s opinion, so why present obstacles and add even more difficulty?

If someone states something that you think is wrong, wouldn’t it be better to start with: Listen, I don’t see it the same way as you but I might be wrong. That happens to me a lot. If I am wrong, I will change my mind… Let’s take a look together, would you mind?

This type of phrasing is magic because no-one can object to “I might be wrong, let’s take a look together.” Who can find anything to say about that? Therefore no-one will ever be annoyed with you if you promptly admit that you are subject to error.

Here is an excerpt from the book “The Mind in the Making” by James Harvey Robinson to learn more:

[Translator’s note: The book excerpt is translated from the French version, so the text may not match the English version of the book exactly]

We can spontaneously modify our opinions effortlessly and without emotion. But if someone tells us that we are wrong, we revolt against the accusation and instantly adopt a defensive attitude. We form our convictions lightly, but the instant anyone threatens to snatch them from us, we develop a fierce passion for them. Obviously, it is not so much our ideas as it is our self esteem that we fear is in danger…

Principal #11: Respect others’ opinions. Never tell people they are wrong.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Contrary to the first article in the series which focused on simple things that can be implemented, here I deal with concepts that seem to me to be profound and interesting, and that require, for the most part, reflection and time to learn more and then use them. Often, these are the foundational concepts in the books from which I drew them – even though there are some that don’t come directly from the ten books in the category – and I think that they all have the potential to change our view of the world with regard to their subject matter. Here they are without further ado:

1 – We are all more efficient when our mind is free of parasitic thoughts that endlessly invade it. When we reach a state of absolute concentration, where we are completely focused on the task at hand, we are capable of miracles, that is to say, of doing things more quickly and efficiently that we could have imagined. It is a state in which we can choose to dedicate ourselves completely to our tasks, without the slightest interruption, parasitic thought, daydream or other source of distraction, while remaining absorbed and in full possession of our faculties. A dream, is it not? It is what practitioners of martial arts call “mind like water” (Mizu-no-kokoro), and athletes call “being in the zone,” or psychologists the flow. Moments like this have no doubt occurred in your life. Were you performing, more satisfied with yourself and your accomplishments? No doubt you were.

It is possible to cultivate habits that allow you to reach this state frequently, to develop a system. GTD recommends a system completely based on writing in order to free our mind from all the thoughts that endlessly interrupt our concentration. Matthieu Ricard, in The Art of Meditation, tells us this is the best way to develop a more attentive mind, conscious of the present moment, free of all emotions and negative thoughts. There are no doubt many other ways to reach this state of mind, and the fact that it is described in multiple disciplines shows clearly that it is an important universal concept and that we will benefit by learning more about it.

To learn more:

• Review of The Art of Meditation
• Review of GTD
• And thousands of other internet resources …

2 – It takes years and years to completely master an art, a discipline, or a subject. To become a true master in a field, if that’s your goal, is a bottomless well that you never truly reach.

It was only 58 years ago that Twyla Tharp, famous American choreographer, and author of The Creative Habit, finally felt like a “master of choreography.” For the first time in her career, on the occasion of her 128^th ballet, The Brahms-Haydn Variations, she felt like a perfect master of all the components that make up the dance – the music, the steps, the symbolism, the use of people on the set, and clarity of the objective. She finally had the skills to fill the void between what she saw in her mind and what actually happened on the set. The achievement of mastery takes time. Be patient. Never give up. But how will you know when you have achieved mastery in something? Is it the total realization of your objectives, a feeling of inner completeness, the unequivocal respect of others? Why do you seek total mastery?

To learn more:

• Review of The Creative Habit

3 – On the other hand, understand that very often it is useless to seek perfection and that you can be happy with good results by carrying out 20% of the actions that lead to 80% of the result.

Effectively, perfectionism leads us on an endless quest and makes us concentrate on details that aren’t important, and that can be a means of procrastination – putting the most important things off until tomorrow. Now, Pareto’s Law tells us that in general, 20% of the objectives produce 80% of the results. The 80/20 percentage is of course not exact to last the decimal point in most situations, but it describes effectively the enormous imbalance which takes place in an incalculable number of fields; 20% of clients in a company make up 80% of its revenue (that’s the case in mine), 20% of countries in the world share 80% of the wealth, in these same countries, 20% of the population share 80% of the wealth, 80% of our work is finished in 20% of the time we allocate for it, 20% of blog posts are visited by 80% of the visitors, 80% of our annoyances come from 20% of our relationships (customers, friends, acquaintances, etc), 20% of our relationships bring us 80% of the love we need, etc. This concept may seem completely alien the first time that we are confronted with it, but its universality has been proven in many fields.

Imagine what would happen if you got rid of a maximum of 80% of the things you do and that only bring you 20% of your results, so that you could concentrate on what is really important? And why is it that this law is so universal? Does that mean something? Are there ways to concretely apply it in our lives? The wealth of questions and possibilities that this concept opens up is absolutely fascinating. It is worth learning more about it, from a practical and theoretical point of view, and I think that it is completely susceptible to changing our lives if we can find a way to apply it intelligently.

To learn more:

• Pareto’s Law
• The long tail, or how to get the remaining 20%, but with only 1% effort using new technologies
• Read Living the 80/20 Principal, less work and stress for more success and pleasure, which will explain the practice and theory in simple terms.
• Read The 4-Hour Work Week, an absolutely concrete and enthusiastic application of Pareto’s Law!
• And thousands of other internet resources…

4 – Our freedom in life is, like our freedom of movement in a building, in part defined by its structure. Effectively, everything has an underlying structure, whether it is physically like a bridge or a skyscraper or as immaterial as the plot of a novel or the form of a symphony. Our life is a structure, it is composed of multiple elements interacting with each other and with itself.

The structure determines the movements and behavior of the objects that comprise it, and:

1. We advance in life by taking the path of least resistance, the one which is easier to travel within our structure – just as it is easier to enter a room by the door rather than a window.
2. The underlying structure of our lives determines the path of least resistance.
3. The actual structure of our lives is in large part determined by the paths of least resistance in our past, at present almost completely forgotten.

[ad#ad-bas]

Thus:

5 – In order to live our dreams, it is preferable to change the structure of our lives rather than resolve our problems. Effectively, we can learn to recognize the structures that play a role in our life and change them so that we can create what we really want to create. But how do you change a structure? By creating. Often we think in terms of solving problems, but this approach only allows us to change some of the elements here or there without changing the structure, and this initial structure can only lead then to elements in their initial state.

When we try to solve a problem we are acting to remove something: the problem. When we create, we are acting to make something happen: creation. Therefore by thinking structurally, rather than saying “How shall I make this unwanted situation go away?” we say to ourselves “What structure should I adopt to create the results that I want to create?”

It is a radically different approach. And much more efficient. And which is best, once we have mastered it, for giving us the key to create the life we want rather than put up with a state of affairs that we don’t appreciate, to be proactive rather than reactive, in short to create out of our desires and our imagination rather than responding to the constraints and stimuli. Personally I find the concept of structure and the path of least resistance absolutely fascinating, because it is a sort of theory of individual freedom, the freedom of every human being to live the life he wishes for. It is a concept so rich and loaded that I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read The Path of Least Resistance, the book that explains all this, and it is really beneficial to learn more about it. Is the actual structure of your life what you wish for? How was it created? Did you choose it or did it arise from elements beyond your control? Are you more focused right now on solving problems without seeking to change the underlying structure?

To learn more:

• Structuralism
• Systems
• Review of The Path of Least Resistance

6 – To renew your energy and that of your co-workers, concentrate on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. Efficient people renew their energy. They know they you can’t build on weakness. Their first task consists of gathering strength. They assign roles and promotions according to what men can do, by taking their good qualities more into considerations than their defects. Trying to staff an organization with men who have no weaknesses or “good subjects” leads to mediocrity, even incompetence. Strong men always have weaknesses: wherever there are mountains there have to be valleys.

Efficient people don’t ask themselves “How will he get along with me?” instead they ask “What can he bring to the table?” They don’t ask themselves “What is he capable of doing” but “What does he do especially well?” When they interview, they look for exceptional qualities in an important area rather than general skills. Finally, by concentrating on strengths rather than problems, you must inflate the possibilities and deflate the problems. This is a strong concept because it is actually applied very little. And for your own part, do you concentrate more on your strengths or your weaknesses? And what do you do with other people? Why do you think it is more important to focus on strengths? What is the ego’s role in self esteem deep down? Do you prefer doing things in an area in which you are gifted or where nature has given you no particular talent? Is the pleasure of doing something tied in some degree to the perfection with which we do it?

To learn more:

• Review of The Effective Executive
• Review of Strengths Finder 2.0: Now, discover your strengths

7 – Knowing how to manage computers – the skills of the 80s consisting of clicking buttons, making menu selections, opening or closing files – are no longer enough in the Information Age. The Information Age is characterized by the omnipresent, skyrocketing volume of bits that we deal with. Bits are everywhere today, traveling at the speed of light from one end our planet to the other and transport a quantity of information that is increasingly more significant, increasingly more different, and on a significantly increasing quantity of peripherals – computers, telephones, PDAs, MP3 players, vehicles and even refrigerators. The number of emails is exploding, new acronyms and new technologies appear every day and millions of people from students to doctors, from teachers to CEOs, from graphic designers to computer technicians, are overwhelmed by the amount of information that they receive every day and have to deal with.

For this worldwide problem there is a solution: learn to manage this mass of information by using good practices and good tools, in a process similar to learning how to read and write allows us manipulate symbols which form the written language. This talent is so important in this era of streaming information and communication that whoever has this skill can overcome the hurdle of overload, climb to the top of their profession, and enjoy a life with less stress, better health and more time for their family and friends.

Bits are heavy, you either consume them or ignore them. The fact that they are predominant today is due to their unique properties making them so desirable: they are very small, very fast, easy to acquire and created, copied and shared in almost infinite amounts, protected by the ravages of times and free from limitations of distance and space. Bits are however paradoxical: they don’t weigh anything yet they seem to weigh us down, they don’t take up any space, but they seem to always accumulate, they are created in an instant but they can remain indefinitely, they move at the speed of light, but they make us waste a lot of time.

Avoiding or ignoring these paradoxes only lead to being engulfed by the avalanche, fortunately, information management training teaches us how to avoid that.

Finally, learning to manage information is summarized by applying GTD and and the 20/80 rule to sort the information, while using good tools. This concept is fundamental for learning more and achiveing mastery in our era, and will become more so given the omnipresence of digital information tools leading to information all around us. Knowing how to manage information is for me as important today as it must have been to learn how to read and write in the 19^th century: it gives you a considerable advantage over those who have not mastered it.

To learn more:

• Review of Bit Literacy

8 – It is better to fail while trying to fulfill our dreams than not trying to fulfill them. A dream is transformed into an objective when it is assigned a time limit – and actions to get there. You should not be afraid of failure; it’s even very important. Failure is cool. It is an enormous source of learning, and can cause us to make progress in an area more quickly than years of apprenticeship with no setbacks.

What is also great about failing? In many ways, the creative act is a question of refinement. You suppress or modify bad ideas that didn’t work. That exercises our judgment. There are many ways to fail:

• Failure of skill. You have an idea in your head but you don’t have the required skill to implement it.
• Failure of concept. You have an idea that is poorly formed and doesn’t fit properly in your life.
• Failure of judgment. You leave something in your idea or your project which should have been taken out – and that results in imbalance in the total creation.
• Failure of nerves. The worst. You have everything you need except the necessary guts to follow through with your idea and explore it to its fullest potential.
• Failure of repetition. Despite having overcome one or more similar failures, you repeat the same mistakes.
• Failure of denial. The deepest. Creating something new and fresh is an act of daring, of presumption. You think that the world cares because you have something to say. And they don’t really care, you shut yourself up in denial feeling misunderstood and cursing a world that doesn’t understand your genius. Do you consider the fulfillment of your dreams as nothing but possible? Do you think that the mere act of trying to reach your dreams, the path, is more important than the fact of reaching them? – the destination? Do you experience or would you experience more pleasure by trudging along the path that leads to your dreams even if you are not sure of reaching your destination, than meandering along a sure path but one that you are not sure is taking you anywhere?

To learn more:

• Review of The Creative Habit
• Review of The Path of Least Resistance
• Review of Lead the Field

9 – In the end we are all powerful human beings who have a mountain of jewels inside us ready to be harvested, and we can learn to surpass ourselves to create the life we want. Learning, understanding, acting, creating, making mistakes and learning from these mistakes, trying and succeeding to constantly overcome our limitations, these I think are the ingredients for a life that is worth being lived, an exciting life full of challenges which we can turn to at the end and say “yes, I have lived well and that’s just as well”

translated by www.DeansResource.com

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Creativity

• The Creative Habit – Learn it and use it for life

One Sentence Summary:

Creativity is learned, nourished and maintained; for inspiration to flow through us and spring forth from the mind, you must prepare, have rituals that invoke it, to know our creative DNA – what we are made for, use our memory and connect disparate things with each other, organize work documents so that we always know where to find them, know how to scratch the surface of things to extract the essential, use the accidents and incidents that that appear in our life, have an idea-base which serves as a backbone for our creation, use our talents wisely, recognize roadblocks and the moments that overtake us, know how to fail, and pace ourselves over the long term – to the very end.

Strong Points:

• Good book, in which the pleasant format judiciously adds value to the contents.
• Packed with ideas, tricks and ways to develop and maintain creativity.
• Full of practical exercises and practially inexhaustible.
• Twyla Tharp tells us about numerous relevant personal experiences

Weak Points:

• A bit too much emphasis on purely artistic creativity.
• Some passages are not believable showing a certain lack of scientific knowledge in the author.
• Book is a bit too packed and crowded at times.

My score :

• The Path of Least Resistance – Learn to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life

One Sentence Summary: Our freedom in life, like our freedom of movement in a building, is partly defined by its structure, thus to be able to create our life, and move towards our ideal, it is better to change its structure rather than change our behavior within the same framework, this book teaches us to do so by showing how we can create a structure in our life, which draws us inexorably, and almost effortlessly, along the path of least resistance- and pushes us to create what we really want for ourselves.

Strong Points:

• Complete method, rich and profound
• Concrete use of a system to change our lives
• Many passages that stand out for their intelligence and the impact they cause
• A dense book which will only be completely understood after several readings

Weak Points:

• Very dense
• Lots of jargon
• Lots of repetition
• Complex

My rating:

Read more reviews about The Path of Least Resistance on Amazon.

Buy this book on Amazon :

Boost Your Productivity

• Getting Things Done – The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

One-Sentence Summary: To be efficient, your mind must be crystal clear, like spring water; to get to that point you need to get rid of all the parasitic thoughts that permanently distract you, which you can accomplish by putting  everything that you want to, or must do into an external automated system, thus relieving your brain of the need to think – which it does badly, without directed prioritization and without consciously choosing the right moment.

Strong Points:

• Complete and coherent method
• Presented in a simple manner
• Intelligent and how-to friendly

Weak Points:

• In spite of the levels of altitude defined by the author, this method will not make you more intelligent or more conscious of what you really want: you could become more efficient at something that you hate doing.

My rating:

Read More Reviews about Getting Things Done on Amazon.

Buy this book on Amazon:

• The Unwritten Laws of Business

One Sentence Summary: To succeed in your career, you must understand and apply many unwritten rules with respect to the work, the chain of command, colleagues, project management, the organizational structure, what managers expect from their subordinates, character, personality, and personal development; sometimes these laws seem obvious but even so, those presented in this book are regularly forgotten.

My score :

Read more reviews about The Unwritten Laws of Business on Amazon.

• The Effective Executive

The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done

One Sentence Summary: An executive – one who makes decisions that affect your business – must be effective, that is, he must do what it takes; this book teaches us to do that, by teaching us to learn how to watch our time and to organize it, to ask ourselves about what we contribute rather than what is owed to us, to nurture the energy in ourselves and in others by focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses, concentrating on priorities by trimming the past and having the courage – rather than the intelligence – to determine what they are, making effective decisions based on 5 basic principles, and to understand that every choice has alternatives.

Strong Points:

• Concise and relevant
  
• Many practical applications proposed, mostly in the form of relevant questions to ask
  
• For any person exercising responsibility in the workplace – an executive in the broad sense
  
• A solid foundation on which to build efficiency
  
• Can be read as a summary of the fundamental principles of efficiency

Weak Points:

• The examples may seem a bit out of date
  
• Water has passed under the bridge since then, and many books have appeared to deepen the concepts covered by the author

My rating:

Read more reviews about The Effective Executive on Amazon.

• Cut To The Chase

One Sentence Summary: Our time is the most precious thing we have; to look after it, it is important to know how to get straight to the point by understanding a number of rules; this book presents 100 of them.

Strong Points:

• Short and concise
• Lots of excellent rules, most of them good 
• Lots of pictures, with a sense of humor and a penchant for poetry.

Weak Points:

• Does not deal with the subject in depth 
• Lots of sports imagery and notably football, which might put some readers off – or not

My rating:

Read more reviews about Cut to The Chase on Amazon.

[ad#ad-bas]

• Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload

One Sentence Summary : Many people are as unprepared for the onslaught of information in this new era as illiterates would be in a library, even the younger generation, as familiar as they are with computers, are not so with the massive amounts of information that come their way; this book teaches us to manage it via various diverse methods, tools, tips and software.

Strong Points:

• Overall approach original and intelligent
• Contents relatively timeless (by comparison to the average information technology book) 
• Numerous ideas and interesting methods, even for expert digital information users
• Revolutionary for everyone who is not an expert in digital information

Weak Points:

• Anti-Microsoft and pro-Apple absolutely not in an objective way 
• Doesn’t talk about certain technologies like file indexing and voice recognition
• Methods that make a digital information professional like myself raise his eyebrows; there are certain points on which I absolutely disagree with the author; I will write an article about this soon

My rating : (if you are not an experienced digital user)

(if you are a seasoned expert with your own methods)

Add half a star if you have a Mac and another half star if you are anti-Microsoft.

Read more reviews about Bit Literacy on Amazon.

• The Simplicity Survival Handbook – 1

One Sentence Summary: In life there is theory and practice, and there are things that “usually” work a certain way, that in actual practice work differently; discover how things really work in the professional world by exploring these 32 Ways To Do Less and Accomplish More and have a more productive and calmer life.

Strong Points:

• Amazing format, with numerous humorous and helpful drawings
• Designed not to be read in its entirety: choose the parts that interest you the most
• Detailed and intelligent content
• How-tos in the form of bulleted lists that are easy to understand
• Substantiated with probes, surveys and scientific studies

Weak Points:

• Above all designed for people who work in large corporations

My rating:

Read more reviews about The Simplicity Survival Handbook on Amazon.

Buy This Book on Amazon :

Projects Management

• Results Without Authority

One Sentence Summary: Today in large organizations, it is rare that the project lead has supervisory power over all the people on his project team. He must, however, maintain enthusiasm, motivation and results from people without being able to use the power of his position and powers of coercion; this book teaches us numerous techniques to do so.

Strong  Points:

• Detailed
• Good internal organization
• The author is experienced which comes through in every paragraph.
• Focused on large corporations

Weak Points:

• Heavy format, dry and irritating
• Sometimes a bit too theoretical and conceptual
• Very focused on large corporations
• Not translated into French

Translated by http://www.DeansResource.com

My rating: (if you lead projects in a large corporation)

(if you lead projects in another sector)

Read more reviews on Results Without Authority on Amazon.

• Making Things Happen

One Sentence Summary : Project management is a complicated art which requires you to master a number of things such as planning, understanding what needs to be done, writing a good overall vision statement, understanding where ideas come from, understanding what to do with ideas, writing good specifications, understanding how to make good decisions, communication and interpersonal relationships, what to do when things go badly, understanding why leadership is built on trust, making things happen, managing the strategy in the middle and at the end of the project, or understanding questions of power and politics; this book describes in detail each of these components and gives us numerous methods and tricks for mastering them.

Strong points:

• Very thorough
• Sprinkled with humorous phrases which lighten it up
• The author has obviously mastered his subject down to the tips of his fingernails
• Geared towards the software industry, but contains advice and methods applicable to the management of any project in a large organization.

Weak Points:

• Very, very heavy
• A little too geared towards the software industry
• A little too geared towards large organizations

My rating: (if you are called to lead projects in large organizations – add a star if your company is in the software industry)

(if you are called to lead projects in another field)

Read more reviews about Making Things Happen on Amazon.

Buy this book on Amazon:

Conclusion, and My Best-Of

Well, I hope that this summary will help you to find what is helpful for you in this category of the Personal MBA . Here are my  my three favorite books:

1. The Path of Least Resistance : I think about the content of this book without stopping. Yet it’s one of the most difficult to read ofthe entire category, but it is a gold mine full of nuggets. Change the structure rather than solve problems, it’s so brilliant, genius, so universal …

2. Getting Things Done – The Art of Stress-Free Productivity : I have applied only part of GTD (see GTD, Implementation – 1) but I already see many benefits in implementing this method: a clean desk, a clearer mind, tasks made more efficiently, and even better sleep. I can not imagine what I will win when I will have fully implemented it .

3. The Simplicity Survival Handbook : This book is a model of practicality, because of its funny and practical format, and the fact that it is designed so that anyone must only choose, read and apply what is directly relevant to you. And its content is simply awesome.

If you must only retain three books, that would be those in my opinion .

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Here, I am giving you 10 from among those that seemed to me the most relevant, with a link to a summary of the book in which I found them:

1. If something requires less than two minutes to do, do it immediately. This will increase your productivity considerably without much effort because if something takes less than two minutes 1) it takes almost as long put it into a to-do list than to complete it, 2) given that it is small, these things can quickly add up to a number that is hard to manage, 3) bog your mind down uselessly when they are not on a to-do list and 4) not doing them can have consequences that are disproportionate with regard to the time it takes to complete them. Be careful all the same, sometimes you must map out large spans of time to focus on a project, time which cannot afford to suffer interruptions.

2. Try this trick when you can’t sleep at night. Lack of sleep is a terrible way to lose productivity, as well as the reason for being out of sorts, in a mad mood, lack of focus and other maladies which can have even more dramatic consequences on our relationships with others. To fight against occasional insomnia – for chronic insomnia, it is better to seek medical treatment – try this trick to free your mind and stem the continuous flow of thoughts which begin to invade it:

• Keep a pen and paper beside your bed.
• As soon a thought enters your mind, write it on a piece of paper and write next to it the very next action you must take to progress to the level of this thought.

For example, if you say to yourself “I must send this quote to a client,” write:

Quote customer – find supplier costs in the catalog

If it’s “I think that our marriage is on the rocks,” write:

Marriage – Talk about it with [best friend]

You get the idea. As long as you put your thoughts down on paper, and the first actions to take, you will feel more at peace, and these ideas will leave your brain alone, because they have no further reason to bother you since you have made a decision. For more detail on these two pieces of advice, read the review about GTD.

3. Cultivate a “Let’s go and look!” attitude. Sometimes a quick visit to the field can teach you more than a week spent analyzing numbers, sitting comfortably at your desk. The next time that someone comes to make you aware of a problem, stand up and stay “Let’s go and look!” This will save you precious time.

4. Abstain from using bad language in the workplace. This advice can seem incredibly old hat in this modern, liberated world, but it stems from pure common sense: not using bad language will never offend anyone. Using it sometimes might offend someone. Abstain and you will perhaps avoid conflicts or difficult situations that will eat up energy and time. For more details on these two pieces of advice, read the review of The unwritten laws of Business.

5. For everything you do, ask yourself “Why am I doing this? Is it necessary?” Sometimes we carry things out entirely by force of habit, without asking ourselves whether it is necessary or if it necessarily needs to be done by us as opposed to someone else. This can be a big reason for wasting time and energy, because we end up doing things that aren’t worth the time we spend on them or quite simply aren’t useful. Ask yourself this question regularly when you carry out a task: “What would happen if I skipped this?” If the reply is Nothing, then you should put a stop to the activity, if not, ask yourself: “Would it be better if someone else carried out this activity?” Your reply will give you an indication of what you should delegate.

For more detail, read the review of “The Effective Executive.”

6. Just Begin.

Whatever you can do or dream that you can do, begin. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!

Goethe

7. Close the loop. Have you ever dealt with someone who tells you “we will call you if we run into problems?” Two weeks go by and still no call and you begin to ask yourself if everything is really all right. When people don’t close the loop, they leave others waiting, which is distracting and can even subtely change the relationship. Don’t be like them. Keep others up to date. They will be grateful to you for respecting their time and will repay you one way or another.

8. Don’t let your Blackberry become your master. You should not let technology keep you connected 24 hours a day just because it allows you to. You would not give a hammer or a wrench the power to decide when it should be used. Don’t give this power to your phone or your PDA. Define a schedule and limits for using them. Turn them off when you are in meetings or working on something else that involves other people or demands concentration. Let people know that you don’t check your emails or phone messages after a certain time or on weekends. Thus you will define a clear boundary between times when you are working and others will let you be more focused on what you are doing.
For more detail on these three pieces of advice, read the review of Cut to the Chase.

9. Backup your electronic files regularly. There are two types of users in the world: those who already make backups, and those who will do so some day, usually after having lost weeks or months or years of work. Having worked for more than 8 years in the field of information services, I can only confirm that backing up is one of the subjects most frequently neglected, especially by small or specialized companies. It always amazes me to see that someone who has spent 20 hours writing a report or a document won’t even spend one minute backing it up… I have already seen enough number of people who were left with only their eyes to cry after losing essential data due to negligence – including one student who lost his master’s thesis one month before having to present it – to be disgusted by so much unnecessary suffering. Backup often and backup a lot, backup too much even: it is better to backup too much than not enough. Check Carbonite, an excellent online automatic backup utility that is not expensive.
For more detail, read the four part summary of Bit Literacy.

10. Recognize when it has all been said.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Note: because this book is both heavy and complex, I am publishing the summary in two parts. Here is the second part, the first part is here.

Summary and Book Review, second part:

• Chapter 9 : Communication and relationships

For a long time during our civilization, the slowness of communications posed several problems. Many disasters and misunderstandings arose from this situation. Today, communication is still important, but two things have changed:

• Speed is no longer the main problem (what could be faster than an instant message?) Instead, it is quality and efficiency of communication that have assumed primary importance.
• Communication is not enough for complex work; you also need effective relationships between people who work together.

Even though there are often clearly defined leaders who sometimes give orders, projects depend heavily on the team’s ability to use each other’s knowledge, to share ideas and to work in a synchronized way, as opposed to being based on overly strict lines of authority, rigorous discipline and the need to follow orders without asking questions.

Because project leads spend a lot of time communicating with individuals and groups, they have more responsibilities that require them to communicate effectively with respect to the team. This does not require the extrovert personality of a TV presenter, an extraordinary sense of humor or magical powers (although they may help). Rather, it starts by admitting that communication and interpersonal skills are critical for success, and that there is room for improvement for you and your team.

Additionally:

• Projects are not accomplished by communication alone. In these modern times, speed is not the Achilles heel of communication. Quality is.
• Interpersonal relationships improve and accelerate communication.
• There are several types of communication that people use to communicate with each other. Project managers must be familiar with them in order to be able to diagnose and resolve communication problems.
• There are numerous common communication problems, like assumptions, lack of clarity, not listening, personal attacks or blame.
• Role Definition is the easiest way to improve interpersonal relationships.
• Ask people what they need to do a better job. Ways of doing so include: listening, removing barriers, teaching and reminding them of the objectives.
• Relationships between people and communication are not low priority efforts. They are essential to all individual activities that take place during a project.

Exercise :

Make two ordered lists, one with the most important people on your team, the other with those on your team with whom you have the best relationship. Find opportunities in the two lists to improve your relationships; if you could improve your relationships by 25%, what would be the biggest impact to your project?

• Chapter 10 : How not to annoy people, process, email and meetings

The bigger your team, the more likely the chances of annoyting someone. Whenever you are following someone else’s work, or making decisions that impact others, you have the potential to annoy them. If you are smart, you will find ways to minimize disagreements. People will be happier, the project will go more smoothly, and you will have fewer black looks when you pass people in the hallways.

The three activities that annoy people the most are email, meetings and team processes (like build or specification procedures).

Additionally:

• Project managers are inclined to annoy others. Some things could be avoided.
• People get annoyed for many reasons. Often it when they believe their time has been wasted, when they are treated like idiots, or when they are expected to put up with a prolonged annoyance or poor treatment.
• Good processes have many positive effects, which include accelerated progress and the prevention of problems. But they are difficult to develop.
• An email which is not annoyting is concise and actionable (it contains an action), and it quickly allows readers to figure out if they care enough to read more than the email header or the first sentence.
• Meetings are conducted well when someone runs them.
• Frustrating meetings result when the objectives are not suited to that type of meeting.

Exercise:

When was the last time you complimented someone for their clear, simple emails? Next week, every day, thank the person who sends you the clearest, most effective email.

• Chapter 11 : What to do when things go wrong

No matter what you do, no matter how hard you work, or who you work with, things will sometimes go wrong. The best team in the world, with the best leaders, workers, resources and the best morale, will find itself in difficult situations. The only way to completely avoid difficult situations is not to do anything important or to put yourself permanently into situations or projects in which you are protected from all forms of risk – two things which rarely contribute to success.

Good project managers must therefore be prepared to manage difficult situations. That requires a certain amount of wisdom to understand that when bad things happen, it is what it is. There is nothing you can do after the fact to change it. Instead, how the team reacts to adversity can be a more important factor to success than the team’s ability to prevent problems. Both are important but resilience and recovery are the abilities that give you the ability to manage the possible unknown. Without them, the best team and the best plan can spiral out of control with the slightest push in the wrong direction.

Additionally:

• If you can remain calm and break the problem into smaller pieces, you can manage many difficult situations.
• There are some actual situations that you can anticipate, like errors due to not paying attention, being forced to do stupid things, lack of resources, poor quality, a change in direction, personnel problems, and the desire to mutiny.
• Difficult times are learning opportunities. Make sure that you and your team take the time to analayze what happened and how it could have been avoided.
• Taking responsibility for situations, without worrying about who caused them, always helps to resolve them more quickly.
• In extreme situations, put yourself in “damage control mode.” Do whatever is needed to get the project back into a stable state where it is understood.
• Negotiations are not only useful in crisis situations, but also for managing. Good negotiators work towards people’s interests, not their own positions.
• Keep a clear perspective on who has what authority at all times. People need to know who has the power to make decisions before a crisis occurs.
• People react to pressure in different ways. Be observant and open in how you help your team manage different types of pressure.

Exercise:

Go into the office and find five things that could go wrong. For each one, describe how you are going to manage the problem if you are assigned the task to fix it. Who needs to be in the room to manage the problem? What will you do if you are not in a position of power?

Part 3 : Management

• Chapter 12 : Why leadership is based on trust

As far as leading your team is concerned, everything depends on the assumptions that people make about you. When you say “I will make sure that gets done tomorrow” or “I am going to speak to Carol and get her to agree,” others will silently calculate the probability that what you say is true. Over time, if you are serving your team well, the probability will be perceived as very high. They will believe your work and trust you.

Even though in the movies leaders are portrayed as having a dramatic role – such as throwing themselves into burning buildings or bravely fighting alone against a whole host of enemies – true leadership is based on very simple and practical things. Do what you say you will and say what you mean to say. Admit when you are wrong. Incorporate the opinions and ideas of others in decisions which impact them. If you can do these things, more often than not you will earn the trust of those you work with. When the time comes for you to ask them to do something unpleasant or which they don’t agree with, their trust in you will make your leadership possible.

Therefore, to be a great leader, you must learn how to find, build, earn and give trust to others – as well as learn to cultivate trust in yourself.

Additionally:

• Trust is built on effective commitments.
• Trust is lost through inconsistent behavior towards important issues.
• Use authority and trust to allow people to do a good job.
• Institutional power comes from the company organizational structure. Power of recognition comes solely from people’s response to your actions. Recognition power is the most useful institutional power, although both are necessary.
• Delegate in order to build trust in your team and to assure yourself that your team is united in the face of adversity.
• Deal with problems in a way that will keep people’s trust. Be supportive during crises so that they will tell you problems rather than hide them from you.
• Having confidence in yourself is the foundation for leadership. Self-discovery is the way to learn who you are and to develop a healthy independence.

Exercise:

Make a list of the 5 people that you work with the most. Who do you trust the most and why?

• Chapter 13 : Making things happen

The ability to make things happen is a combination of knowing how to be the catalyst in a variety of different situations, and having the courage to do so.

Additionally:

• Everything can be represented in an ordered list. Most of the work of project management is assigning the right priority to things and leading the team to get them done.
• The three basic ordered lists are: the project objectives (vision), the list of functions and the list of work items. They must always be synchronized with each other. Each work task contributes to a function and each function to an objective.
• There is a bright yellow line between the priority of what I am working on and all the rest.
• Things happen when you say no. If you don’t say no, you have not effectively prioritized.
• The project manager must make it so that the teams stays honest and close to reality.
• Knowing the path of least resistance in engineering and in team processes allows for efficiency.
• You must be both tough and smart to make things happen.

Exercise :

Who in your organization has the reputation for making things happen? How did they earn it? And who are the people with a reputation for not making things happen? Is there a relationship between their position in the organization and their ability to make things happen?

[ad#ad-bas]

• Chapter 14 : Middle-game strategy

Just as in the middle game when playing chess, the middle of a project is the moment when a lot of things happen at the same time, and it’s difficult to keep a clear perspective about what is going well and what is not going well. To fight this inevitable fog that surrounds the team and makes inexperienced people get easily lost, you must apply these three simple principles:

1. If things are going well at the end of the first day, the objective for the next day is to make it so that things continue to go well.
2. If on any day the project is not going well, it’s your job to figure out what the problems are and to act so that the project goes well again. This can take hours, days or weeks.
3. Repeat until the project is finished.

The problem is that you only have a limited amount of time to understand what the problems are and even less time to solve them. Not to mention the effort needed to protect the healthy parts of the project from the problems. For these reasons, and more, stress and energy levels in the middle of the game are very high. The team is moving at an ever increasing pace, and the acceptable margins of error are going down on a daily basis.

Additionally:

• Projects are complex non-linear systems and have significant inertia. If you are expecting to wait until problems are serious before acting, you will be late and might make things even worse.
• When your project is out of control, you are flying behind the plane, which is a bad place to fly. There are both tactical and strategic points to be verified.
• Think about how to act to correct a situation in the best possible way. The bigger the action, and the further along the project, the more dangerous the action can be.
• Schedules based on milestones provide opportunities to make corrections for project paths that are more certain.
• Configuration control is how you manage change acceleration from a low level and an intermediate level on the project.

Exercise:

If you are in the middle of a project now, take five people at random from your team and ask them to describe their confidence in the schedule in the form of a percentage. Do the same thing with five managers. Compare the results and present them at a team meeting. If it’s useful, do it every week. Make it so that the descriptions are anonymous so that people will be honest.

• Chapter 15: End-game strategy

When the end of the project is near, someone must find a good way to apply the brakes in order to slow down the progressive movement so that things end well.

Additionally:

• A big target is a series of little targets.
• Every milestone has three smaller targets :
  • Design complete (specifications complete)
  • Functions complete (implementation complete)
  • Milestone complete (quality assurance and refinement complete)
• Defining the exit criteria at the beginning of the milestone increases the ability of the team to finish on time.
• Being on schedule is just like landing an airplane: you need a long, wide approach. And you better be ready take off again quickly, without having to make major repairs..
• You need metrics to track the project. Common metrics include day to day work, bug management and the business charter [?].
• You need control elements to adjust the levels of a project. Common elements include review meetings, tries, and centralized decision making at the end of the project.
• The end of the game is a slow and difficult process. The challenge is to reduce the scope of the changes until you have a satisfactory finished product.
• Now is the time begin the postmortem process. Give yourself, as well as your team, the benefit of learning from what went well and what didn’t go well.
• If fortune is smiling on you, and your project works out, be happy. Very, very happy. A lot of people, even though it is not necessarily their fault, don’t get that far. Look forward to a great night out. Do something fun and extravagant (like inviting the author of the book to a party). Provide stories that will be told for years to come.

Exercise:

You are two days away from a major news release on your news site, used by millions of people. The champagne is ready and waiting. But an engineer discovers a major problem which is going to take three days to fix. The problem is the 10 million dollars spent on publicity for the launch date and the time already spent. What will you do?

• Chapter 16 : Power and Politics

Every time you try to organize people to do something, whether it is to get ready for a party or start a business, the people concerned have different attitudes, skills, and different desires. This means that it doesn’t matter how talented the leader of a project is, there will always be people who won’t get what they want. Therefore, there is a natural instinct in ambitious and motivated people to try and get what they want by influencing the people with the power to get things done.

The fuel that propels politics is power. Someone who can influence the right person at the right time, and who uses his knowledge to resolve situations to everyone’s satisfaction, can be more powerful in an organization than those who are at the top – sometimes without even knowing it.

For project managers this means two things:

1. There will be political influences that impact you, whatever your power or your personal ethic.
2. Power and politics are an inherent part of management.

You must therefore at least be conscious of how political systems work if you want to reduce their negative effects, not to mention if you want to increase their positive effects.

Additionally:

• Politics is a natural consequence of human nature. When people work together in groups there is a limited amount of authority which can be distributed amount different people with different wishes and different motives.
• All leaders have political constraints. Every executive, CEO or president has peers or superiors who limit their ability to make decisions. In general, the more power someone has, the more complicated are the constraints upon it.
• There are many different types of political power, like rewards, coercion, knowledge, references, and influence.
• Power is misused when it is applied to things that do not further the objectives of the project. A lack of clarity with respect to the objectives, loosely allocated resources, or unclear decision processes can contribute to this misuse of power.
• To resolve political problems, be clear about what you want. Identify who has it, and then evaluate hoq you can get it.
• If you are involved in project management, you lay out a political playing field around you. It’s up to you to decide up to what point it is honest or unfair.

Exercise:

Is it possible to work with other people and have nothing to do with politics? Think of a work environment with the healthiest political environment possible. What makes it possible?

Book Review:

This book is heavy. Very heavy. 370 wide pages, full of text, with some diagrams here and there. Fortunately, the author takes his work very seriously, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously, which means that his book is sprinkled with nice, humerous sentences which lighten it all up somewhat.

In the end, I have trouble judging because, other than directing a small business, I have never managed projects of the human and technical complexity levels that the author is talking about. Furthermore, this book is clearly geared more towards people who work in large organizations, just like Results Without Authority, and even more specifically to people who work in the software development field, even though the author visibly does his best to be as general as possible – but there are so many references to the software industry that he does not achieve his objective.

I would say, therefore, that it is obvious from reading this book that Scott Berkun is someone who has a lot of experience in this subject and that he has mastered it exceedingly well. I know that one day I will have to manage more complex development projects than those in my current company, and I won’t hesitate to dive into this book to pull out the tricks and ideas or find answers to specific problems. This book therefore has a place on the bookshelf for all project managers who work in large organizations. Once again, for $39.00, if this book only gives you one good idea, it will largely pay for itself. If you are a project lead in the software industry, dig in. This book is made for you ;

Strong points:

• Very thorough
• Sprinkled with humorous phrases which lighten it up
• The author has obviously mastered his subject down to the tips of his fingernails
• Geared towards the software industry, but contains advice and methods applicable to the management of any project in a large organization.

Weak Points:

• Very, very heavy
• A little too geared towards the software industry
• A little too geared towards large organizations

Translated by www.DeansResource.com

My rating: (if you are called to lead projects in large organizations – add a star if your company is in the software industry)

(if you are called to lead projects in another field)

Have you read the book? How do you rate it?

Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

Read more reviews about Making Things Happen on Amazon.

PMBA Challenge:

Cost of the Book:	€ 31.24
Total cost of the project:	€ 217.77
Number of pages:	370
Total number of pages:	3061
Time to read it:	3H
Time to write this article:	8H
Total time for the project:	114H30

Buy this book on Amazon:

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

One Sentence Summary : Project management is a complicated art which requires you to master a number of things such as planning, understanding what needs to be done, writing a good overall vision statement, understanding where ideas come from, understanding what to do with ideas, writing good specifications, understanding how to make good decisions, communication and interpersonal relationships, what to do when things go badly, understanding why leadership is built on trust, making things happen, managing the strategy in the middle and at the end of the project, or understanding questions of power and politics; this book describes in detail each of these components and gives us numerous methods and tricks for mastering them.

By Scott Berkun, 2008, 370 pages.

Note : Since this book is both thick and complex, I am publishing the summary in two parts. This is the first.

Summary and Book Report:

Scott Berkun is an author and speaker who has worked at Microsoft for 9 years as a project manager going from Internet Explorer (1 through 5), Windows and MSN. In 2005 he published the first version of this book, The Art of Project Management, which was centered more around project management in the area of software development and the phenomenal success of which, for a book of this type, led to this revision, in which the subject is more general and touches on general project management, for any sector.

Every chapter ends with a list of exercises – extremely relevant – to reflect on the subjects dealt with and put them into practice. I am giving you one at the end of each chapter summary.

The author begins by telling us that the idea of project management goes back a long way in human history. Everything that humanity has built, from the Egyptian pyramids or the Roman aqueducts up to a Boeing 777 or the Hubble space telescope, have been designed and then implemented. Between these two stages is found the art of leading long and complex projects to fruition.

The author wonders if there were points in common between all these projects, if he could find common denominators. He did not always find obvious answers, but each time that he returned from his quests into the past to dive into the world of software development, his own tools and processes appeared differently to him. And there were three lessons that he drew from these expeditions:

1. Project management is not a holy art. All modern engineering work is a new foray into history and things already realized. Technology and skills might change, but the central challenges remain the same. Everything is both unique and derived from something else. In order to be able to re-use past knowledge, you must be open to both.
2. The simpler your vision of what needs to be done, the greater your power of concentration to accomplish it. If we keep a simple vision for our work, we can find useful comparisons with other ways of doing things all around us. It’s a similar concept to what the Japonese call shoshin, or keeping a beginner’s mind - an open mind – which is an essential element in martial arts. Staying open and curious is what makes growth possible. In order to continue learning, we must resist the temptation to succomb to the safe and narrow visions with regard to what we are doing.
3. Simple doesn’t mean easy. The best writers, athletes, programmers, and managers tend to be people who see what they do as simple by nature and difficult at the same time. For example, it is simple to run a marathon. You begin running and you don’t stop until you have completed 40 kilometres (26 miles). What could be simpler than that? The fact is that the difficulty of it does not reduce its simplicity. Leadership and management are also difficult, but their nature – making it so that things happen in a specific way towards a specific objective – is simple.

Additionally:

• Project management might be a job, a role or an activity.
• Leadership and management require understanding and intuitive knowledge of numerous common paradoxes, such as:
  • Ego/No-ego: The ego can be a driver for managers, who often derive great personal satisfaction from their work. However, managers must avoid placing their own interests above those of the project, and must delegate important and fun tasks, and share the rewards.
  • Autocrat/Delegator: In certain situations, the most important things are strong and clear authority and a quick response time, and the manager must have the necessary confidence and the will to take control and force certain actions. However, the general objective must be to avoid these situations.
  • Oral/Written: Even though many organizations today are email-centric – notably software development companies – oral communication is still important, there are always meetings, negotiations, hallway discussions, and brainstorming sessions. In general the larger the organization or project, the more writing skills are important. But a good manager must recognize when written or oral communication will be more efficient.
  • Courage/Fear: One of the biggest misconceptions of our culture is that people who are brave don’t experience fear. That’s a lie. A brave person is one who feels fear but chooses to act anyway.
• If you are a dedicated manager, find ways to capitalize on your unique perspective of the team and the project.
• In the end, all projects use similar processes; they all allow time to plan, implement and refine.

Part 1: Plans

• Chapter 2 : The Truth About Schedules

People tend to be late. It might only be a few minutes, or from time to time during the week, but people often fall behind on their daily schedule (however, because denial is a great skill we humans have, I will understand if you refuse to admit that it applies to you). For many of us, being on time doesn’t mean at an exact moment but over a span of time. For some it is larger than for others.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that so many projects end up being behind schedule. We tend to base our estimates on weak assumptions, to predict results by banking on the best possible circumstances and – basing ourselves on our previous experiences – we simultaneously avoid putting our trust in the forecasts that we see or create.

In this case, if schedules are not reliable, why use them ? Because they primarily serve three purposes:

1. They allow the team to engage.
2. They encourage everyone to see their work as a contribution to the whole.
3. They allow us to measure progress.

Thus even if schedules go awry, they still have value.

Additionally:

• Big schedules must be divided into small plans in order to minimize risks and increase the frequency of adjustments.
• All estimates are probabilities. Because schedules are collections of estimations, they are also probabilities. This works against scheduling precision because probabilities are cumulative (80% x 80% = 64%).
• The more estimates you make, the less precise they are. However, rough estimates are the only way to create a point of departure for having better ones.
• Schedules must be made with skepticism, not with optimism. Invest time in the design phase to highlight the assumptions made and the confidence that has been placed in them.

 Exercise:

If you use a calendar, take a look at yesterday’s schedule. How many events happened on time. For those that fell behind schedule, how many were your fault?

• Chapter 3 : How to figure out what to do

Few people agree on how to plan projects. Often, most of the time spent during the planning stage is wasted on getting people to agree on how the plan should be done. It is therefore not surprising that many books about project planning do not agree with each other. Some focus on the commercial strategy, others on engineering, and some on understanding the customer’s needs. What is most distressing is not the different points of view; it is the fact that very often they’re written as if the other points of view didn’t exist. It’s strange since none of the perspectives – business, technology, customer – can exist without the others. Moreover, in general project planning success is arrived at in the intersection between the different points of view.

Because of this, it is important for each project to ask these questions:

• Who has responsibility for requirements definition? Someone needs to define the requirements to which the project is responding, and get them approved by all interested parties.
• Who has responsibility for the design? The design is different from the requirements definition because there are always several possible designs when responding to a requirement.
• Who has technical responsibility? Whoever that is chooses which engineering approach to use, which includes tools and architecture approach.
• Who has budget responsibility? The ability to add or remove project resources might be independent of other types of responsibility, particularly when it is a project being implemented for a customer.
• How frequently are requirements and designs reviewed, and how will adjustments be decided?  The response depends in large part on the preceding questions. What’s more there are parties involved who each have different responsibilities, so there must be effort put into keeping everyone synchronized during the project.

Additionally:

• Different projects require different planning approaches.
• How planning is done is often determined by who has the responsibility.
• There are some common deliverables for project planning:
  • Documents on marketing requirements 
  • Documents on the vision and overall approach
  • Specifications
  • Structure for breaking up the project
• The most powerful project planning method involves using the three perspectives equally: business, technology and customer. The customer perspective is often the most misunderstood and badly used.
• Asking questions forces you to think well and focus your energy efficiently.
• The requirements definition process is difficult, but there are some good reference books on how to do it.
• Researching problems and scenarios is the simplest way to define and communicate requirements. They are easily converted into design ideas without losing what is important and what is not about them.

 Exercise:

Imagine that you are the manager on a project where the engineers and marketing staff don’t like each other, and they are fighting about basic decisions. What actions could you take to improve their relationship? (Hint: What questions have not been asked? What points of view have not been represented?)

• Chapter 4: Writing the good vision

One of the challenges for a project leader is keeping people focused on the same objectives for long periods of time. Therefore the challenge in project management is not just getting things started in the right direction, but also getting things to stay on track.

To do this, a document explaining the project vision is absolutely essential. Actually, writing is undoubtedly the greatest technology man has ever invented because it decouples the abilities of our brain, of which memory is notoriously unreliable, especially when it comes to retaining complex things. Putting things on paper allows us to free our mind up which in turn can dedicate all its energy to the tasks that we have outlined (the effectiveness of GTD comes therefore directly from the entrusting all our tasks to a reliable written system.

It is not useful to write volumes. The  Declaration of the rights of man is only a page or two long. The first Constitution of the United States is only one page long. If a government has been able to define the vision for its country’s system in such a small amount of space, you can do the same thing to describe your project’s vision. Typically, the vision statement is no longer than six pages.

Additionally:

• Vision statements distill planning artifacts into a single high level plan.
• Writing things down serves both the writer and the team. It provides a basis for discussion and a point of reference that does not depend on people’s fallible memory.
• The amount of detail of a vision statement varies with the nature of the team and the project.
• Team objectives must be derived from the objectives defined in the vision. Individual objectives must be derived from team objectives.
• Good visions are simple, goal-oriented, consolidated, inspiring and memorable.
• Quantity does not mean quality. It takes more effort to be concise than the other way around.
• Keep the vision alive by asking questions about the usefulness of the vision and about the daily decisions of the project.

Exercise:

What will happen if someone’s individual objectives are in conflict with those of the team or the project? Who does the responsibility fall upon to correct that? What actions should he or she take?

[ad#ad-bas]

• Chapter 5: Where ideas come from

The not very surprising truth about the origin of ideas is that they come from people. That is to say there is nothing magic about ideas. We are all capable of having them – even though some of us are better than others. Never forget that it is fundamental to human nature to use our creative powers to resolve the problems that humans encounter in the world. In spite of the poor education that we have in the modern world to use our talents well, they are there.

Whatever the project is, the ability to find good ideas is important from the first day to the last day. The outcome of these ideas can vary (some impact the whole project while others a single line of code), but the process for discovering and selecting them is the same. This process serves to fill the void between requirements and solutions. Just as the fact that we know where we are going does not help us find the best path when we come to an unknown fork in the road, knowing our requirements does not tell us anything about what decisions to make when we must choose between several solutions. Intelligent travelers find ways to minimize their chances of straying down a cul-de-sac, perhaps by walking a short distance along each path and trying to find another point of view (a hill, a mountain, a geostationary spy satellite controlled from a distance) which gives them more information. The further they need to go on their journey, the more they will probably need to find time to explore.

There are two simple ways to fill the void between requirements and solutions; a high quality requirements definition, and design exploration. These two ideas are tightly coupled.

The requirements definition basically communicates the customer’s needs and/or the project objectives, with sufficient clarity to allow them to be converted into actions by those doing the work. A good requirements definition does not simply define how to solve a problem; instead it identifies the problem clearly enough that someone with good expertise can work with confidence to accomplish it. The requirements definition is critical. It serves as a point of departure to generate ideas and potential solutions. If the requirement states “there shall be a door and it shall be green,” everyone who is going to conceive how to complete the project is going to think of different kinds of green doors.

Once the requirements definition is in place, people can explore the territory encompassed in the requirements. There is a large space, called the problem space, the potential means for resolving any problem. As far as requirements, this space might be large, for example there is an infinite variety of ways to create a house, a meal, a website, or anything you are paid to do.

Additionally:

• Many teams do not manage their time well between requirements and specifications..
• A high quality requirements definition and an exploration of the concept are the best use that you can make of your time.
• Ideas are good or bad only in relation to the objectives or other ideas.
• Constraints are useful for finding ideas, but thinking outside the box is not necessarily the answer. Sometimes the best solution is to find a better way of working with the constraints.
• Questions, perspectives and improvisation games are tools for finding new ideas.
• The best place to being with design ideas is the customer’s experience.
• Ideas morph into designs via conversations between different people with different types of expertise.

Exercise:

Find someone who you think is more creative than you. Ask him where he gets his ideas, and what habits he has that cultivate his creativity. Take one of the habits he uses and try it for a week (if you can’t think of anyone, take Picasso, Einstein or any person famous for his creativity in your field).

• Chapter 6: What to do with ideas once you have them

As hard as it is to find good ideas, it is even more difficult to manage them. Even if good design ideas are investigated, and even if people are excited about the work they are doing, the challenge of converging on the specifications remains in tact. If moving faster does not result in definitive design decisions in a timely manner and things are not well managed, disaster hits you in the face. For many reasons, that is where project failure begins.

The solution is to manage the field of possible ideas cautiously. Someone must plan and guide each step of the specification exploration.

Additionally:

• Ideas have their own inertia. It will take longer to dominate the creative process than you think.
• Create checkpoints for creative work so that you can follow it and manage it. Common checkpoints include feasibility studies, regrouping of ideas, three alternatives, two alternatives, and one design.
• Use affinity diagrams to consolidate ideas.
• Prototypes allow a project to confront problems early and learn about errors without significant risk.
• Use iterations, or the progressive refinement of a prototype, to ask questions, evaluate progress, and decide the next steps.
• Create a list of open problems to follow up with the questions that need resolution before the specifications are completed.

Exercise:

Should ideas be managed in an open or private manner? Who on your team should have access to a) view b) modify c) add or delete ideas?

Part 2: Skills

• Chapter 7: Writing good specifications

Many experienced people fall into the trap of thinking that there is only one good way to write specifications, which tends in general to be the last thing they did. They assume that because projects were not a complete disaster, that the way they wrote (or didn’t write) specifications contributed in a positive way to the result – a claim which, without investigation, may or may not be true. Even worse, if good questions about how and why the specifications were written were never asked, no-one on the team can truly understand what is a good or bad process for writing specifications, or up to what point they contributed or did not contribute to the team’s performance.

There are therefore many ways to write specifications, which could each be better tailored to the situation. But they should all do three things for the project:

• Ensure something good gets built.
• Provide a schedule of milestones that concludes the planning phase of the project.
• Allow an in-depth review and feedback from different individuals during the course of the project.

Additionally:

• Specifications only resolve certain problems. Team leads should be clear about which problems they are trying to solve with the specifications, and which problems should be solved by other means.
• Good specifications simplify. They are primarily a good form of communication.
• Specifying is very different from designing.
• The person who has control over writing the specifications should have clear authority.
• A review process is the simplest way to define and control the quality of the specifications.

Exercise:

Tale a big bucket of LEGOs and find another project manager. Divide the LEGOs into two piles, putting the same number and the same types of pieces into each pile. Sit down with your back to the other manager, until one of you creates something with the LEGOs (it doesn’t matter what it is). Once that’s done, the one who did it tells the other one, using only words, how to build the same thing. Compare results. Then repeat the exercise, changing roles.

• Chapter 8: How to make good decisions

A dozen project managers were interviewed while this book was being written. One of the questions that Scott Berkun asked is how they make good decisions. Most of their responses included weighing options, defining criteria, and finding different ways to resolve problems. But when the author asked how many decisions they made in a day, and how frequently they used these techniques, they often realized that something was wrong. Many then admitted (after looking over their shoulder to be sure no-one was listening) that it’s impossible to always follow a formal process for decision making, given the limited time that they have available and the number of things that they need to do.

Instead, they agreed that they often make decisions based on their intuition, on reasonable assumptions, and on a quick assessment of the immediate problem with regard to the overall project objectives.

Bad decisions are very often not the result of a weak or inexperienced mind, but simply a bad division of energy and time available between the decisions that need making. There is a meta-process for deciding what decisions to invest time and energy on. It’s this ability which explains why some people can manage five times the amount of work than others; they instinctively divide their work into smaller pieces, finding the decisions and actions with the most leverage – 20% which make up 80% of the results – and invest most of their energy making these decisions and actions the best possible.

Additionally:

• Anaylze decisions rather than spending too much time on them.
• Look at the indifferent zone and opportunities to use an assessment efficiently.
• Use comparative analysis for decisions that are worth the effort.
• All decisions have an emotional component, whether we admit it or not.
• Lists for and against are the most flexible method of comparative analysis. They allow us to involve others and get fresh perspectives on decisions.
• Information and facts can’t make decisions for you.
• You will improve your decision making skills by reviewing past decisions made and exploring them to find lessons and opportunities for better tactics.

Exercise :

Think about what you are going to do this weekend. Make a list for/against each of your options. Include a choice to do nothing and at least one hybrid choice (including a part with several options).

The rest in the next episode;)

Translated by www.DeansResource.com

Read more reviews of Making Things Happen on Amazon.

Buy this book on Amazon:

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

One Sentence Summary: Today in large organizations, it is rare that the project lead has supervisory power over all the people on his project team. He must, however, maintain enthusiasm, motivation and results from people without being able to use the power of his position and powers of coercion; this book teaches us numerous techniques to do so.

By Tom Kendrick, 245 pages, 2006.

Summary and Book Review :

Note: This book is very heavy, in a very classic academic format (translate: irritating) and very focused on large corporations, I read it using the rapid reading techniques of 10 Days to Faster Reading, notably scanning and scraping. I am giving you a quick summary, which I hope will be sufficient for you to get a good idea of the book’s contents.

Projets are everywhere. Some are successful, others are not. And many projects fail because the project lead cannot control things well enough to bring them to their final conclusion. Projects today often take place in complex environments where the project lead does not have formal authority over the members of his project team. And even those that do, there is always a part of the project that falls to someone who doesn’t have this authority. Fortunately, it is possible to control a project and make it successful by using techniques that don’t depend on your position in the organization or your formal authority. Let’s take a look at them.

• Chapter 2 : Control by Process

Most projects are difficult. Without sufficient processes there is naturally chaos and the project is certain to fail. Processes for projects are generally:

• Life Cycle and Methodology: they impose discipline on projects. Life cycles principally serve to coordinate related projects, and methodologies assure that there is consistency in the way projects are carried out.
• Project Definition: a clear and unambiguous definition is essential for the control of a project.
• Change Management:  one of the most problematic aspects of technical projects is the lack of control over change specifications. To avoid this you must: 1) freeze the overall direction when you define the project foundation and 2) adopt a style of efficiently managing change for the rest of the project.
• Risk Management: even though this phase is generally started when the project is initiated, maintaining it during its execution reinforces objectives and keeps the team’s attention focused on the work ahead.
• Quality Management: This gives structure to the project and allows requests to take effect that otherwise would have been ignored by the project lead.
• Conflict Management: conflicts are inevitable. From the project outset you should develop a process to manage conflict at the resource level, timing, priorities and other things.
• Decision-Making Process: A project requires plenty of decisions,  making them quickly and well is essential for good control of a project.
• Information Management: Archiving the data for a project is fundamental to controlling the project, and can be used on future projects.

To improve your process management on a project:

• Clearly document how you will use the different project processes.
• Analyze old projects to uncover problems caused by structure and work with your team to make decisions at the level of the infrastructure of the project to resolve them.
• Reachback to expertise within the organization and the project management skills of your company, but resist the temptation to hand over control of your project.

• Chapter 3 : Control by Influence

It is often said that management is a given, but leadership must be won. One of the aspects of a leadership role is to exert your influence both inside and outside your project team. Your management style is extremely important, and your influence over others depends on what you have to offer in exchange for what you need.

There are different types of power:

• Power of position: without doubt the most visible in an organization, since these are appointed leads in the company hierarchy.
• Power of coercion: tied to power of position, the ability to inflict sanctions.
• Power of compensation: accessible to anyone, since compensation can be simple encouragement, simple congratulations, or some other form of appreciation. But biggest material compensation (advancement, salary increases) are generally reserved for people holding positions of power.
• Power of expertise: conferred by exceptional mastery of an important subject on the project or in the organization.
• Power of personality: which comes from your investment in your communication with others and in the team’s unity, as well as in your efforts to insure mutual trust allowing frank exchanges. This power is especially important in times of trouble or stress.

Generally, projects are transversal in organizations and companies, which means that the project lead does not have the power of position or coercion. It is therefore important to use the other types of power.

To improve your influence:

• Adopt a leadership style that works for other members of your team and which will work to produce whatever matters the most to people.
• Build self awareness and your skill at influencing others.
• Work at increasing your influence by your actions and your behavior.
• Build and maintain relationships of trust and respect with every member of your team.

• Chapter 4 : Control with Project Measurement

All projects make slow progress, especially long and complex ones. Without sufficient measurements to determine whether the project is progressing, finding anomalies in time might be impossible, or worse, the project could start out in the wrong direction without you knowing.

Typical measurements for managing projects and comparing them to others include:

• Resource allocations and cost estimates
• Project benefits and value delivered
• Complexity
• Provisional production estimates
• Measures of risk and uncertainty
• Project Duration

To improve your control over project measurement:

• Rough out the performance that you need from your team to maintain control of the project.
• Identify measurements that line up with the project objectives and desired performance.
• Select a small group of measurements and get help with them  from your team.
• Test the measurements and  establish a reference baseline.
• Use the measurements to monitor and control your project. 
• Chapter 5 : Begin Control at the Project Start

Projects with problems often get off to a shaky start. Control begins at the very moment the project begins, because a good project start is vital to the success of the project. Ideally, the project team lead and the team must be completely in agreement in getting the project off to a good start. To do this you must get help from the project sponsor (often a senior executive who initiated the project concept), solid documentation and a kickoff meeting for the project.

To improve your project starts:

• Deconflict key appointments for the project sponsor for continued help and to begin to establish a good relationship with him.
• Develop a captivating vision for the project and adjust it according to your need to inspire and motivate your team.
• Understand your objectives in detail and document the project schedule with minutiae.
• Conduct an efficient kickoff meeting so that your project gets off to a healthy start.
• Put more effort into building relationships of trust with remote members of your team.

[ad#ad-bas]

• Chapter 6 : Increase Control with Project Planning

Creating a plan for your project forces you to figure out how you are going to meet the objective, which provides a solid foundation to follow your progress towards it. Planning, however, only gives you a simple basis for control; planning in a collaborative process allows you to create cohesion and a feeling of belonging to a project on the part of your team. Further, a credible plan shows that your project is possible, even if it is difficult.

Without a plan, forecasts for the project are based on hopes, dreams and wishes – these are rarely good foundations for building trust or efficient control.

To improve your project planning:

• Plan your project meticulously with your team, and integrate their ideas, suggestions and perspective into your planning documents.
• Use planning data to establish a realistic reference baseline, for negotiating the changes required to initial objectives, with your sponsor and his associates.
• Begin execution of the project with a credible and comrephensible plan that is available to all the members of your team.

• Chapter 7 : Maintain Control during Project Execution

Peserverance matters. All projects run into difficulties, and most undergo substantial changes. Control contributes to execution through a strong and tenacious focus through what is going on, what has been accomplished, and what is still be be done. Statistics collected on projects show that the 9th, 99th and 999th activity of the project are equally important – and they are. Holding up fact gathering on status to resolve a problem equates to loss of control.

Diagnostic measurements are the basic elements for collecting information on status. They provide the information you need to assess performance and progress, and their visibility assures you that the problem will be handled.

To improve execution of your project:

• Define diagnostic measurements for your project that strengthen your control over it, then get your team to carry them out.
• Be dogmatic and disciplined in collecting information on the status of a project.
• Use informal communication to gather facts and work at maintaining trust and a good relationship with your team.

• Chapter 8 : Monitoring and Surveillance for Controlling your Project

Most project cycles lead to a least some bad news. Treating problems as mild inconveniences is the first step in good control. Finding a way to adapt or change the plan so that it accommodates the bad news means accepting the problems, not succumbing to them. To do this you need a good toolbox full of appropriate tools to control schedule, costs, quality and other potential problems.

To improve monitoring and surveillance:

• Manage changes from the perspective of disciplined process which only accepts necessary changes that can be professionally justified.
• Develop and implement rapid change actions when a problem arises.
• Use reports and other formal forms of communication to keep people informed of your project and up to date with its progress.
• Motivate your team by thanking them and recognizing their merits and compensate them when appropriate.
• Periodically re-examine long projects to validate objectives and plans, and to revitalize the project vision.
• Take care of obstacles to progress and rapidly resolve conflicts.

• Chapter 9 : Improve Overall Control at Project Close

Good project closure requires time and work, but it is important for controlling future projects. Obtaining the acceptance of your sponsor and his partners for the fact that your work is done appropriately is necessary before you can transition to a new project. Retrospective measurements contribute to long term control by indicating the improvement process necessary and validating the predictive measurements of the project. Finishing and archiving final document for your project provides necessary information to define and plan similar projects in the future..

And speaking of future projects: it’s a small world, therefore it is almost certain that you will work with some of the people on your current project again. Therefore you must absolutely do things to strengthen your relationship with your team. Celebrate the fact that you have finished, and recognize and reward the contributions of your team by thanking people for the work they have done.

To improve your project closure:

• Finish your work and get formal acceptance for its termination from those you deliver it to.
• Complete final documentation for the project.
• Thank your team and celebrate the fact that you are finished.
• Be aware of what you have learned and use it.

• Conclusion

If you are asked to run a project, it’s because someone believes in you and your ability. If you do too, you are probably both right.

However there is a list that the author calls Full Strength Projecticide, which sums up everything you need to do to fail on a project:

• Always choose a project based on just your “feelings.”
• Never share project selection criteria with your team: it’s none of their business.
• Avoid responsibility for the project by claiming that you are not the sole decision-maker.
• Always ask for “long term objectives” that are not attainable.
• Enlist additional sponsors that will give you conflicting objectives.
• Keep allocated resources for more important things until the project reaches a crisis.
• Never waste time discussing things with project leads; you have more important things to do.
• Ignore changes in your environment and focus entirely on your daily activities.
• Make changes to the project at least every week to keep everyone on the ball.
• Never make decisions, even small ones, without asking for more information and a detailed investigation.
• Discourage in-depth analysis of lessons learned on a project, because everything will be different next time anyway.

The author finishes with ten pages of questions that are relevant to multiple aspects of a project.

Book Critique:

As I indicated above, this book suffers from being somewhat dry, heavy and irritating, which is real torture after the excellent format of The Simplicity Survival Handbook. It is like a classic academic book.

Fortunately, it is quality content and you can sense Tom Kendrick’s great experience in managing projects.  The techniques, tricks and methods that he provides throughout the book are relevant and appropriate, even though sometimes they seem a little too complex and theoretic.

The huge amount of information and its excellent organization by chapter – and within each chapter – make it easy for you to find the information you need to deal with a particular problem if you have to manage a project. This book is therefore an excellent toolbox that every project lead can put in his library without any problem, to make use of whenever he needs to, and extract knowledge to no doubt avoid countless problems and time wasting.

The main advantage, and major take away of this book, is that it is strictly focused on large corporations and their internal workings. If you work in a small business, a medium business or for yourself, you will find ideas here and there on how to manage complex projects with suppliers and external providers but the most important points in the book will not be for you. If you are regularly called on to lead projects for large corporations, dig in.

Strong  Points:

• Detailed
• Good internal organization
• The author is experienced which comes through in every paragraph.
• Focused on large corporations

Weak Points:

• Heavy format, dry and irritating
• Sometimes a bit too theoretical and conceptual
• Very focused on large corporations
• Not translated into French

Translated by http://www.DeansResource.com

My rating: (if you lead projects in a large corporation)

(if you lead projects in another sector)

Have you read this book? How would you rate it?

Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

Read more reviews on Results Without Authority on Amazon.

PMBA Challenge :

Cost of book:	€ 14,35
Totla cost of the project:	€ 186,53
Number of pages :	245
Total Number of pages:	2691
Time to read it:	1H
Time to write this article:	3H30
Total Project Time:	103H30

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.