Have you ever been part of an impossible project? Next week’s Business901 podcast guest is Michael Dobson, author of Project: Impossible – How the Great Leaders of History Identified, Solved and Accomplished the Seemingly Impossible – and How You Can Too!. The book was a fun read for me and so was the podcast. Michael does an excellent job of weaving project management lessons in and out the stories. Michael, knows a thing or two about project management, he has written over twenty-five books.
An excerpt from the podcast:
Joe: When we think of a crisis like that, how much project planning goes into a crisis, such as Tylenol. Were they just winging it in that instance?
Michael: Well, the part of the background of the Tylenol situation was that a lot of the executives of
Johnson and Johnson had just gone through training or some workshop about corporate ethics. Their vision and mission statements and all these good management practices and they really only had one question to ask themselves. Did we mean all this stuff that we were saying? Once they said “Yes, we did mean it,” then they had a basis to go on. You’ll see this as a theme in a couple of stories. In Apollo 13, you know the famous CO2 exchanger that we all remember from the Apollo 13 movie, the fact is that there had been a tremendous amount of training in crisis response, there was an emergency kit. They couldn’t very well have done it without duct tape. Somebody had to think about putting together an emergency kit that included things like duct tape that was available generically. With Patton in the Battle of the Bulge, he didn’t do it in 48 hours. He anticipated it and had his planners hard at work. With Caesar at the Battle of Alicia, it was the long term training of the Roman soldier that allowed him to take on the absurd task of building this amazing set of fortifications in a very short period of time with very little in the way of supplies. If you don’t start early, if you don’t have the foundation, if you don’t have the vision, if you don’t have the training, if you don’t have the emergency kit, well, your ability to handle a crisis when it shows up is extremely hampered. Normally, crisis management by definition is reactive rather than proactive, but a lot of training, a lot of the prep work, a lot of the mind-set comes well in advance and in most cases by the time the project officially starts, it’s too late. If you haven’t started early, if you haven’t built a foundation early, well, there’s not much you’re going to be able to do to recover.
Joe: In the movie Apollo 13, I think of where the person said something to the effect, “gentlemen” . . . .
Michael: Failure is not an option.
Joe: Failure is not an option. Yes, exactly.
Michael: Gene Kranz who never said it. He never said it. What he did do is he was the guy who developed the NASA response following the Apollo 1 capsule fire that killed Grissom, White and Chaffee. There is a long story about the origins of that. Some of it is in the book, and it was after that he developed and announced what he referred to as the Kranz Dictum that was a preparation and mind-set tool for NASA. He insisted and focused on it from the immediate aftermath of Apollo 1. So, by the time Apollo 13 came around, he had achieved what he did call, perfection in the art of crisis management. Simply no way to make space travel or, any kind of, going up explosive powered rocket, there’s no way to make that inherently safe. If you’re not ready with crisis management, you have no business going.
Gene Kranz did well with something he never said, His book is titled: Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond
MICHAEL SINGER DOBSON is a marketing executive, project management consultant and nationally-known speaker. He has been a staff member of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, award-winning game designer, and career counselor in his varied career.