Most of what you know about project planning is a lie

I love me some Zenger and Folkman. During graduate school, in a particularly train wreck-ish project planning moment (half the team was chasing real knowledge, 1/4 was chasing an “A” and 1/4 was asleep), I actually bought subscriptions to their stuff. They’re good. They write well about management and leadership trends, and the majority of it is backed up by research — now, a lot of the research comes from 360-degree evaluations of managers and employees, and 360-degree evals are basically akin to Nazi Germany, but let’s gloss that over for now.

I’ve worked for about 13 years now. Even though higher education bangs the drum that you’ll get out into the world and do all this strategic and critical thinking, the reality is that most jobs are task-based, heads-down-deliverables-focused slop shows. You need to know a lot about project planning, and the great irony of that statement is that we often don’t teach people about project planning. We just throw them into it!

Let’s say you had a newborn and you’re like “Pfft, I want this kid to be Michael Phelps, but I ain’t got time to train it to do that! I got other targets to hit!” So you chuck the newborn in the pool and are like “Go get it, baby!” (Literally.) You know what happens next? You spend 20 years in the pokey. You know the funniest thing about what I just typed? Obviously…