The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
Mark Twain, author
Great organisations implement great projects — it’s what makes them great organisations. Of course, other things are also going on all the time — the things that keep the organisation running.
If you look at figure 16.1, showing the organisational projects model, to the left of the line is where the core business lives. From an implementation perspective, all of that is great. It’s what pays the bills and provides the resources to pay for the implementation of great projects. Traditional management lives there too — you manage systems by monitoring what happens by when. You manage responses. You can’t manage great projects the same way.
The new rules of management mean that we still manage everything to the left of the line, but we recognise that the priority is what’s to the right of the line. The priority is implementing projects that matter. But that’s not easy.
Figure 16.1: organisational projects model
We said earlier that in 2012 Apple was the most valuable publicly listed company in the world, with a market capitalisation of around US$600 billion. There is actually a privately owned company that’s worth about three times that — the only trillion-dollar ...
