I have recently stumbled upon this quote and I did like it so much, I tweeted it and found that many people have retweeted it in a short time, it is a quote of William L. McKnight (1887 – 1978), a former CEO of 3M company, who saved 3M from bankruptcy and made it a multinational and most importantly innovative company!

You cannot manage people from an ivory tower, you have to interact with your team, speak with them on daily basis and melt the ice that may stand as a big demotivator in many organizations, Management By Walking/Wandering Around (MBWA) is a simple yet effective technique to have a robust relationship with your team built on mutual trust, understanding, and agreement.

Have you ever worked on a project where you noticed that some team members are not working as efficient as they can? Have you tried figuring out why those team members are acting the way they do? Have you tried adding more people to expedite execution and eventually it turned out you are not getting the expected performance? If you have already experienced any of these, and you still need to find out the reasons behind that, Social Loafing is the answer!

Do you know the HIPPO? not the hippopotamus animal, it is a different HIPPO, a HIPPO is an acronym that stands for a “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion” or “Highest Paid Person in Organization”, whether you work in a small or gigantic enterprise, you will always find a HIPPO (aka CEO) around, chances are you will be invited to a meeting to take a critical decision that may impact your project or sometimes the entire organization, and so the decision will hit your project either positively or negatively. in this post you will learn 5 ways to influence a HIPPO.

In part three we will examine a very interesting root cause which will make a lot of people scratch their heads, it is Project Manager, yes the project manager is one of the root causes why projects fail, while from the first look this may seem awkward as so many people will simply say that projects fail when there is no project manager, however in my humble opinion a considerable percentage of projects fail because of poor project management, let’s see the sub causes.