Projects on purpose

- It's Seth Godin, and I would like to talk to you today in this class about project management. You've got a great idea. Maybe you're throwing a big party, maybe you have a book or a song in your head, maybe you're organizing something at work. And then what happens? Sooner or later, we have a project to manage. Sooner or later, we need to bring our work to the people who can use our work. And in this class, I want to talk about what I've learned in managing projects. Someone asked me the other day if I thought I had a gift for it. After all, I've produced more than 150 books. 21 of the last 21 books have been bestsellers. It's a project, it's not just writing. Lots of people can write, but how do you bring it to the world? Before we begin, two stories about my project management life from the beginning of my career and more recently. The beginning of my career, I was really lucky to be able to work with Ray Bradbury, Michael Crichton, brilliant science fiction authors with a really cool idea. We were one of the first companies to do illustrated adventure games on personal computers. And the beginning was super fun 'cause we kept inventing new things and figuring out how to make the software work. But there was something hanging over our head, this is 1984. There were 100 people in the company. I had about 40 people on my team. And Radio Shack, and Lechmere, and the other big retailers had said, "Here's our order for Christmas. And if you don't deliver it by October 15th, it's canceled." 'Cause they wouldn't have the inventory they needed to sell stuff, which would mean that the company would go out of business. And so what I learned the hard way is that more effort doesn't get us to ship the product on time. What I learned the hard way is that adding more people toward the end doesn't help us ship on time. And what I learned most of all, is that the constraints, the budget, the time, the quality spec, those three things together are the point. They're not the enemy. And so there was a lot of dancing around to make that deadline. I could tell stories about it all day long, but I learned that that's not how professionals do it. Fast forward to a couple years ago when I volunteered to lead a group of 300 people in 40 countries to build "The Carbon Almanac." We coordinated our effort, we built an API, we learned how to engage with each other, thrashing early, pioneering work, and then locking it down on time and on budget. We built a 97,000-word illustrated, designed, footnoted, fact-checked almanac in 150 days, and we delivered it three days early. And there hasn't been one significant error found since then. What's the difference? The difference is intentionality. Project management. Not simply saying, "I got to make it perfect and I got to make it authentic," but instead saying, "What's the spec? What's the deadline? What's the budget?" We can do this on purpose. It makes our work better. It's not a compromise. And that's what we're here to talk about.