Tag Archives: deadlines

04-Managing a project team, Uncategorized

Steve Jobs and the Value of Deadlines: Real Artists Ship!

1 Comment

jobs-real-artists-ship

I recently listened to Walter Isaacson’s book Steve Jobs, in which the reader (or in my case the listener) is treated to a behind the scenes view of the rise of Apple, Inc. and the role played by its founder.  One of the most memorable moments in the book comes when only a week before the scheduled launch of the Macintosh a  small team of engineers and designers approaches Jobs to let him know they won’t be able to make the deadline.  In an effort to rally and cajole his team to meet the deadline, he exclaims, “Real Artists Ship!”

The concept was that it doesn’t matter if you’re the most creative person in the world if you can’t deliver on that creativity.  There are no shortages of accounts in Isaacon’s book that suggest Jobs was a lover of creative thinking and artistic design –some might say he held that in higher regard than anything else –but this particular instance indicates his clear understanding on the value of delivering the goods –on setting a deadline and sticking to it, no matter what.

All too often in life (with the exception of legal filing deadlines during my years as a litigator) I have been soft on deadlines.  Whether it’s with myself or with people who are reporting to me.  I adopt an “okay, we can push it back one more week,” mentality, believing, like Jobs’s engineers that one more read through of a contract or one more week spent practicing tennis before a big match is going to make a substantive difference.  Jobs’s point, however, was that it does not matter if you have written the perfect contract or crafted the perfect forehand volley if you can’t get out there and share it with the world.  The reason “real artists ship,” is that you only know about the artists that actually sat down and delivered their work –the others, well, they weren’t artists, they were just dreamers.   So set your deadlines for yourself and your team and stick to them!  Real Artists Ship!

If you’d like to read a firsthand account of what it was like trying to meet the Mac software deadline, you can do so here, where Andy Hertzfeld shares his perspective on running under the gun of Steve Jobs.

 

03-Planning the work of a team, work plans

Three Pitfalls of Strategic Planning

Leave a comment

This article describes three areas that managers generally go wrong when trying to plan and execute strategies and deliverables: http://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2013/08/15/3-strategic-planning-pitfalls/

The one take-away I derive is a quote given by the author (Bill Conerly) in an associated link to the article that states, “The value of a goal is not the goal itself but the determination of the action steps most likely to lead to achieving the goal”.

In my line of work, where a lot of project management is involved, I find that a lot of goals are set by my department as well as other departments that oversee the work of my particular unit. However, there is usually a recurrence of problems particularly with managing vendors, deadlines and budgets. Most of these issues we face as a department can be avoided if the “Value of a Goal” defined above is properly adhered to. The three pitfalls in strategy go a long way into substantiating the “Value of a goal”.

The first pitfall, “Avoiding ‘No’ ” describes how a company’s strategy may start off with a well defined focus but would then allow a lot of scope creep to blur the overall vision. The article suggests that this is usually due to the unwillingness of corporate leaders to say ‘No’.

The second pitfall, “Not connecting to actions” is an embodiment of the old cliche, “talk is cheap”. Usually, employees get caught in the moment during a meeting and are excited about certain deliverables. However, the follow through and understanding of certain actionable items tend to lack.

Finally, the third pitfall, “Vague action steps”, which I found to be pretty similar to the second pitfall, also illustrates how lacking a sequential actionable plan could lead to the collapse of a well thought out strategy.

I subscribe to the fact that for a corporate goal to be successful, it should answer the SMART framework. In essence, a goal should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound (SMART). I strongly believe that a goal that meets the SMART framework essentially avoids the three pitfalls described in the article and completely captures the true definition of the ‘Value of a Goal’.