The Red Pill Executive. Tony Gruebl
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and attempts to really understand our world kept us moving forward.
Many thanks to those who edited, read, commented, criticized, admonished, laughed at, and sometimes agreed with the content in these pages. There are too many to name all, but a special thanks goes to present and past Think team members, Dale Matthews, John Camp, Dan Kuffer, Ed Mullin, Ed Hale, Scott Klinger, Erica McQuiston, Scott Sax, Kevin Palmer, Miguel Buddle, Katrina Kastendieck, Ben Adrian, Jewel Green, Andrew Mavronicolas, Rick Thomas, John Hill, Joe Miller, and Sharon Gibala-Marsh, and colleagues, Steve Jenkins, Professor Jim Kucher, Mike Karfakis (and the great team at Vitamin), Collin Cohen, Bill Collier, and Michael Dobson, and photographer Nick Gruebl, and proofreader Mary Coddington.
Finally, thank you to Morgan James Publishing for their support, coaching, and professionalism in bringing this book to market.
Inspired by the legend, Domine Quo Vadis.
PREFACE
2018 statistics show that Operations initiatives—for simplicity we call them projects—come to a less-than-desirable outcome 70% of the time.1 If you are an Operations Executive, at the end of a project you’re sure to wind up in front of a boardroom trying to come up with an explanation for what went wrong. If you’ve been in Operations for any time at all, you’ve been there more often than you’d like to think about. If you’re new to Operations, you’re on a slippery slope, my friend.
“Here lies the body of Mary Lee; died at the age of a hundred and three. For fifteen years she kept her virginity; not a bad record for this vicinity.”
– Captain Quint in Jaws98
Fortunately for you, you have an edge. You picked up this book. We’ve been managing operations for more than 16 years, and we refused to resign ourselves to failure more than two-thirds of the time.
The Matrix2
Starring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne Warner Bros Pictures (1999)
In The Matrix, Keanu Reeves plays a man leading a double life. By day he is a software developer, by night he is Neo, a high-level hacker. He receives a cryptic message on his computer screen from the legendary hacker named Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), followed by a knock on the door. Several people stand outside waiting to lead him to Morpheus.
Morpheus explains to Neo that humans exist in a false reality constructed to hide the truth. This false world is known as The Matrix. Everyone in The Matrix is a slave, sleepwalking through life, simply following the status quo with no hope for a better way, pawns to others with self-serving agendas.
Morpheus holds out his two hands. In each is a pill: in his left palm is a blue pill, in his right is a red pill. If Neo takes the blue pill, he will wake up in his bed and “believe whatever you want to believe.” But if he takes the red pill, his eyes will open. He’ll know what’s truly going on in the world.
Neo takes the red pill.
Immediately he sees the world in a completely different way. He asks Morpheus, “Can I go back?” to which Morpheus replies, “No.”
The red-pill blue-pill scene from The Matrix is a part of pop culture now. It represents the paradox of choice. If we choose to, we can see things differently, but we must make a conscious and deliberate choice. We took an honest look at the blue-pill Project Management model in today’s world and turned it inside out. We pulled off our gloves and got our hands dirty. We took the fight to the back lot. We kicked butt and took names. What we learned is radical, unsettling, and even scary for some.
This book is much more about effectiveness and how to achieve more of it than project management. Over the years, we formulated and refined our Red Pill model, chipping away at our own preconditioning and squashing our assumptions. Our goal: to determine how each company’s culture measures and cultivates effectiveness and how to reach the maximum velocity that culture will allow.
•We debunked mythologies.
•We moved the spotlight to what really matters.
•We measured twice and cut once.
•We deconstructed complicated systems and replaced them with simple principles.
•We reworked a stuffy, cumbersome model and transformed it into something alive, effective, and rewarding.
Our initiatives scored in at a better than 95% success rate.
In 2013, we released our findings and published Bare Knuckled Project Management. As a result, thousands of operators took the red pill. The concept caught on. Our red-pill model began to transform Operations within our client organizations. Operations Executives who embraced this shift in perspective saw their own performance ratings rise while the C-suite looked on, wondering about their secret formula.
“Our goal: to determine how each company’s culture measures and cultivates effectiveness and how to reach the maximum velocity that culture will allow.”
That formula is in your hands right now.
If you’re in Operations—veteran or rookie—you’re in the right place. If you’re a project manager, you’re in the right place. Just be aware, before this ride is over, you’ll come face to face with a choice: red pill or blue. The rest is up to you.
INTRODUCTION
Year after year, the Project Management Institute and The Standish Group have consistently reported the massive failure rates of company projects. This year, the chance of success is 30%. That’s a total or partial failure rate of 70%. What’s even more surprising is that the numbers held fairly steady at 68% failure for about 10 years, then ramped up to 71% in 20153 and then settled at 70% in 2018. We have more tools at our fingertips than ever before, but things continue to get worse instead of better.
“Nothing is wrong here. Especially near the nuclear reactor.”
~Gilda Radner as Roseanne Roseannadanna, Saturday Night Live99
•17% of IT initiatives go so badly they can threaten the very existence of the company.”4
•73% of those surveyed admit their ventures are always or usually doomed from the start.5
•Failed IT projects cost the US economy about $50-150 billion annually.6
•Organizations waste $109 million for every US $1 billion invested.7
Project success rates went from 16% in 1994 to 28% in 2000, up to 32% by 2013, back to 29% in 20168 and up to 30% in 2018.9
Jaws10
Starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss Zanuck/Brown Productions (1975)
During a hot summer in a small beach community, the new Sheriff Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) discovers a shark attack victim on the beach. He wants to close the beaches, but local businessmen resist. Brody backs down, and a young boy falls victim to the predator. When the grieving mother announces a bounty on the shark, amateur shark hunters and fisherman swarm into town, hoping to land the reward.
The beaches remain open, and the death toll rises.
At a town meeting, an experienced shark hunter named Capt. Quint (Robert Shaw) offers to hunt down the shark for an exorbitant price. Soon Quint, Brody, and marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) are at sea, hunting the Great White Shark. As Brody succinctly surmises after their first encounter with the giant creature, they’re going to need a bigger boat.11
In the classic Steven Spielberg movie, Jaws, a ravenous Great White Shark gets a taste for tourists in a small beach town. With the death toll rising rapidly, Sheriff Brody becomes an operations executive with one clear goal—to take out the shark. Brody assembles a team of operators—a marine biologist