Success Keys: Compelling Vision

This is the first of the keys to having successful projects--you must have a compelling vision. That is, the project must be one that will produce an outcome that people find exciting, challenging, and worthwhile. Clearly, whether people find a project exciting will depend on their own internal motivation, so a project manager needs to understand team members in order to select those who will be excited to be part of the team effort. As I have told my seminar participants, there are people who love climbing cliffs. I am not one of them, as I have vertigo. So I would not be excited about a project to scale Mount Everest or even one of the cliffs in my Asheville area, and there are many of them.

But the last project I managed was to develop a state-of-the-art communications receiver which would be used on large ocean-going ships, such as oil tankers. I loved that job. So did members of my team. There were several challenges that made the job fun for engineers. We had to

1. Be able to manufacture the radio for 30 percent less that the model we were replacing.
2. Have it tune in 10 Hertz increments instead of the 100 Hertz increments that the old model tuned in.
3. Improve other performance characteristics, such as selectivity, sensitivity, and so on.
4. And we were trying to out-class our competitors!

Other Examples
If you think about other projects that must have had compelling visions, many come to mind. One that I have always pondered is the building of pyramids in ancient Egypt. Contrary to popular belief, these were built mostly by ordinary Egyptians, not slaves. We know this because they lived in little villages near the pyramids that they were building and left records of their work.

Another example is the space program. In the early days, the challenge was to put a man on the moon and get him back safely by the end of a decade. Part of the challenge was also to beat the Soviets, who scared us when they launched Sputnik.

Finally, a current one is the challenge facing Alan Mulally, now that he is CEO at Ford. The crisis facing the auto industry is huge, and in a recent Fortune Magazine article, Alan presented his vision for what he wants to achieve with the company.

Two Kinds of Visions
There are actually two kinds of vision that are important for project managers. One is a vision for the outcome of the project--that is, what the project is going to deliver. The second vision is about how people will work together. This vision is equally important, because you do not get high performance from a team just because they are working on something they find exciting. If working conditions are bad, it will eventually kill their passion for the job. If there is a lot of interpersonal conflict, bad relationships with supervisors or clients, and bad treatment by managers, they will eventually give up.

Mulally's entire Working Together principles have to do with how people were to interact on the 777 program, and eventually in the entire organization once he became president of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. These included such principles as everyone is included, whining is okay occasionally, and the data sets us free. At the height of the 777 program, there were about 2200 engineers at Boeing working on the job and over 97,000 people scattered around the world. Did all of them catch the vision? Probably not. But if the core team did, that helped to at least spread it to some degree.

Benjamin Zander
If you want to see a compelling presentation on the power of passion, watch the presentation by Ben Zander at the TED conference: http://tinyurl.com/n2huwa. At the end of his talk, Zander says he gauges how much passion people are feeling by whether their eyes are shining. And he goes on to say, if they are not shining, we should ask this question: "What am I doing or being that keeps my followers from having shining eyes?" It's a question we should ask constantly, and we should be surrounded by team members whose eyes are shining.

Warm regards,
Jim Lewis

(c) 2009 by James P. Lewis, PhD