Читать книгу The Red Pill Executive - Tony Gruebl - Страница 9

2018 statistics show that Operations initiatives—for simplicity we call them projects—come to a less-than-desirable outcome 70% of the time.¹ If you are an Operations Executive, at the end of a project you’re sure to wind up in front of a boardroom trying to come up with an explanation for what went wrong. If you’ve been in Operations for any time at all, you’ve been there more often than you’d like to think about. If you’re new to Operations, you’re on a slippery slope, my friend.

“Here lies the body of Mary Lee; died at the age of a hundred and three. For fifteen years she kept her virginity; not a bad record for this vicinity.”

– Captain Quint in Jaws⁹⁸

Fortunately for you, you have an edge. You picked up this book. We’ve been managing operations for more than 16 years, and we refused to resign ourselves to failure more than two-thirds of the time.

The Matrix²

Starring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne Warner Bros Pictures (1999)

In The Matrix, Keanu Reeves plays a man leading a double life. By day he is a software developer, by night he is Neo, a high-level hacker. He receives a cryptic message on his computer screen from the legendary hacker named Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), followed by a knock on the door. Several people stand outside waiting to lead him to Morpheus.

Morpheus explains to Neo that humans exist in a false reality constructed to hide the truth. This false world is known as The Matrix. Everyone in The Matrix is a slave, sleepwalking through life, simply following the status quo with no hope for a better way, pawns to others with self-serving agendas.

Morpheus holds out his two hands. In each is a pill: in his left palm is a blue pill, in his right is a red pill. If Neo takes the blue pill, he will wake up in his bed and “believe whatever you want to believe.” But if he takes the red pill, his eyes will open. He’ll know what’s truly going on in the world.

Neo takes the red pill.

Immediately he sees the world in a completely different way. He asks Morpheus, “Can I go back?” to which Morpheus replies, “No.”

The red-pill blue-pill scene from The Matrix is a part of pop culture now. It represents the paradox of choice. If we choose to, we can see things differently, but we must make a conscious and deliberate choice. We took an honest look at the blue-pill Project Management model in today’s world and turned it inside out. We pulled off our gloves and got our hands dirty. We took the fight to the back lot. We kicked butt and took names. What we learned is radical, unsettling, and even scary for some.

This book is much more about effectiveness and how to achieve more of it than project management. Over the years, we formulated and refined our Red Pill model, chipping away at our own preconditioning and squashing our assumptions. Our goal: to determine how each company’s culture measures and cultivates effectiveness and how to reach the maximum velocity that culture will allow.

 •We debunked mythologies.

 •We moved the spotlight to what really matters.

 •We measured twice and cut once.

 •We deconstructed complicated systems and replaced them with simple principles.

 •We reworked a stuffy, cumbersome model and transformed it into something alive, effective, and rewarding.

Our initiatives scored in at a better than 95% success rate.

In 2013, we released our findings and published Bare Knuckled Project Management. As a result, thousands of operators took the red pill. The concept caught on. Our red-pill model began to transform Operations within our client organizations. Operations Executives who embraced this shift in perspective saw their own performance ratings rise while the C-suite looked on, wondering about their secret formula.

“Our goal: to determine how each company’s culture measures and cultivates effectiveness and how to reach the maximum velocity that culture will allow.”

That formula is in your hands right now.

If you’re in Operations—veteran or rookie—you’re in the right place. If you’re a project manager, you’re in the right place. Just be aware, before this ride is over, you’ll come face to face with a choice: red pill or blue. The rest is up to you.