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Why don't more project managers sound an alarm when they're going to blow past their deadlines? Because most of them have no earthly idea when they'll finish the job. They don't even think it's possible to know. Too many variables. Too much that's out of their control. That's the dirty little secret of project management. As the lead developer on one big software project put it: "Everybody knows the schedule is a joke, and we pay no attention to it. It will be done when it's done." It's funny, though. Big, successful companies that manage huge projects like highways and dams and office parks have to deal with many more variables than a software development team. Yet they usually know how far along they are at any given time, and they keep their customers in the loop. That's how they get to be big, successful companies. Granted, they have fancy project management software to help them stay on top of the sc...

Our brains are meant to see in pictures. Grids and columns of data, while ubiquitous, make it very difficult to see trends or patterns. Additionally, a lot of the new data sources available today, such as genetic data or social network data, don't lend themselves to traditional spreadsheets and graphs. These data types require a different way of displaying them to allow us to see the underlying patterns and stories in the data. I'd like to walk you through an exercise to illustrate how effective visualizations allow you to immediately comprehend a complex set of relationships. Consider a standard map, such as the map of the United States below. If I show you the map and ask you to describe how a few states are related to one another, you can immediately visualize and verbalize an answer. New York is up and to the right of Virginia while Texas is down and to the left. There are several states in between the two and Texas borders fewer states than Virginia does. Simple, rig...

There are many situations where nuance, subtlety, and carefully crafted diplomacy in communications are critical. But most of the time, plain directness can go a long way. Tsun-yan Hsieh, a long-time counselor to corporate leaders and one of my co-authors on the book Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck, once surveyed a group of global CEOs and senior executives about whether they thought their meetings met the intended objectives. Only about 40% of the meetings did. How can this be? The answer lies at least in part in the human tendency to avoid or massage the delivery of difficult or conflict-causing topics. Unfortunately, these are precisely the moments where directness is most needed. Being self aware about the types of conversations and meetings that demand increased frankness is a starting point for more efficient and effective communications — and, most importantly, mutual respect. Here are some principles to aid in this quest: 1. Know the w...

“Convergent” and “divergent” thinking represent two different ways of looking at the world. A convergent thinker sees a limited, predetermined number of options. By contrast, a divergent thinker is always looking for more options. Many of us get stuck in convergent thinking and, as a result, don’t see the many possibilities available to us. Let’s have a look at both types of thinking. Convergent Thinking. Convergent is a form of the word “converging” and so it means “coming together.” Convergent thinking is what you engage in when you answer a multiple choice question (although, in real life, we often only see two choices). In convergent thinking, you begin by focusing on a limited number of choices as possibilities. Then you choose the “right” answer or course of action from among those choices. The figure on the left side of the diagram illustrates convergent thinking. Here’s an example: “People are sick or people are healthy.” For many years after becoming chronically i...

Which is more effective in improving team performance: using positive feedback to let people know when they're doing well, or offering constructive comments to help them when they're off track? New research suggests that this is a trick question. The answer, as one might intuitively expect, is that both are important. But the real question is — in what proportion? The research , conducted by academic Emily Heaphy and consultant Marcial Losada, examined the effectiveness of 60 strategic-business-unit leadership teams at a large information-processing company. "Effectiveness" was measured according to financial performance, customer satisfaction ratings, and 360-degree feedback ratings of the team members. The factor that made the greatest difference between the most and least successful teams, Heaphy and Losada found, was the ratio of positive comments ("I agree with that," for instance, or "That's a terrific idea") to negative com...

WordPress.com is the 15th most trafficked website in the world. It is run by Automattic Inc , a company that is 100% distributed. That means everyone works from home, or more precisely, from wherever in the world they wish. They've been amazingly successful with this strategy, but I was skeptical about how a distributed company really works. Being curious, I decided to do the obvious: Work there for a year as a team leader and find out for myself. Here's what I learned: Creativity thrives online. Recently James Surowicki at The New Yorker claimed remote work inhibits creativity. This is absurd in the age of the web, where thousands work on brilliant projects, collaborating with people around the world. It's true that in a distributed company you can't just walk down the hall to find serendipity, but chat rooms, social media, and blogs provide many chance encounters and serendipitous ideas. Dozens of times a day, WordPress.com releases new features and upda...

As disruptive innovations enter the market with faster velocity and increased firepower, entrepreneurs are finding themselves dealing sooner and more intimately with the law. Sometimes, the innovation is just too new, creeping out consumers and lawmakers who hurriedly work to ban it. Few people remember, for example, that the day after Scottish scientists announced in 1996 the successful clone of a sheep named Dolly, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order banning the use of federal funds for cloning in the U.S and urged Congress to outlaw the technology. (Before that, it had been a subject only for science fiction novels.) But more often the imposition of legal constraints comes indirectly, the maneuverings of incumbents caught off-guard by something dramatically better and often cheaper than their core products and services. Performing a bit of regulatory judo, they often respond to such threats by pressuring regulators who oversee their own activities to declare the ...

How many views make a YouTube video a success? How about 1.5 million? That's how many views a video our organization, DoSomething.org, posted in 2011 got. It featured some well-known YouTube celebrities, who asked young people to donate their used sports equipment to youth in need. It was twice as popular as any video Dosomething.org had posted to date. Success! Then came the data report: only eight viewers had signed up to donate equipment, and zero actually donated. Zero donations. From 1.5 million views. Suddenly, it was clear that for DoSomething.org, views did not equal success. In terms of donations, the video was a complete failure. What happened? We were concerned with the wrong metric. A metric contains a single type of data, e.g., video views or equipment donations. A successful organization can only measure so many things well and what it measures ties to its definition of success. For DoSomething.org, that's social change. In the case above, success mean...

In 2010, IBM ran a survey of 1,500 CEOs and found that the most valuable management skill was no longer "operations" or "marketing" but "creativity." Since then BCG, Accenture and other consultancies have confirmed the global skill shift. Yet, only 9% of all public and private corporations in the US do any product or service innovation, according to the NSF's Business R&D and Innovation Surveys of 2010 and 2011. CEOs say that creativity is a crucial leadership skill, but few apparently have it. And no wonder. Managers are trained in the values of efficiency and the skills of quantitative analytics. That's what most Americans believe in and what most business schools teach. So we now face a difficult transition. After decades of managing to squeeze out profits, how can executives quickly shift to amplifying the creative capacities of their people? First, map your circles of creativity . Businesses are pyramids built to promote efficie...

We're all taught that gossip — talking about someone when he or she isn't there — is not only rude but also possibly hurtful to feelings or damaging to reputations. And yet everyone does it. It would be difficult to find an office where there wasn't some sort of chatter about people who aren't present. Should you be polite and stay above it all? Or does it make sense to get involved in this information sharing? What the Experts Say Gossip is an important part of life, not just office culture. "We learn who we are through what people say to us and about us," says Kathleen Reardon, a professor of management at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business and author of Comebacks at Work: Using Conversation to Master Confrontation . Because we're social beings, we want to connect to people and talking about others is one way to do that. It's particularly difficult to avoid in an office setting. "Gossip happens all the time s...

You're successful, ambitious, and full of big plans. You're on a quest for greatness. But could dreaming smaller help you reach your goals? My friend Whitney Johnson's popular pieces on these pages encourage us to dream, to disrupt our thinking, to dare to do great things. But what I take from Whitney's writing is truly a practical nudge: "Inside of the something you can't have, there is often the makings of something you can achieve." Necessity really is the mother of invention; like many, I took an involuntary course in compromise at work when I found myself with two toddlers, a husband with three jobs, and a small business that would not, no matter how hard I wished it, grow magically by itself. Over the past couple years I've observed several brilliant women and men manage both life's demands and the big dreams they have as entrepreneurs or corporate players. You know, the kind of people who are very successful but still manage to mee...

It's Friday evening. The smells of rosemary chicken and freshly-baked challah fill the house. My daughters, 3 and 9, sigh as I gently detach the iPads from their laps. One by one, our screens are powered down. My husband, Ken, is usually the last holdout, in his office, madly scrambling to send out just one last email before the sun sets. Then he unplugs too. We light the candles, and sit down to a sumptuous meal. I'm prepared. I've printed out the next day's schedule, along with maps and phone numbers that live on my cell phone. Most people in our lives know they will not be able to text, tweet, email, Facebook, chat, or Skype with us for 24 hours. If they want to reach us, they call our landline. Or they come over. And so it has gone, every week for three years. Our "tech Shabbat" lasts from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday. I first became aware of the importance of disconnecting in 2008, when my father, Leonard Shlain, was diagnosed wit...

Picture this scenario: When you started your project about renewing your business website, you were full of enthusiasm. Things were looking good and you were making a good progress on every front. However, now your sky has been crowded by dark clouds. What happened was that the one crucial element of your site—the opt-in box for the site—is missing; it was supposed to be developed and installed by the web design company that has been redesigning your site. The delay was because you forgot to mention about the opt-in functionality in the first place. Since the web design firm got the information too late, they are now unable to get the work done before your set deadline. Needless to say, you have lost your night’s sleep,and the longer the delay of your project is, the more you are going to lose customers and profits. You are disappointed and you blame yourself for the situation. You forgot the gatekeeper In this scenario, our character is facing a very common obsta...