So I want to introduce you today to a groovy new book by Harvard Professor Teresa Amabile and her equally accomplished husband, Steven Kramer. It’s called The Progress Principle, and I think it contains a lot of important lessons for project managers.

The primary [...]

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So what does a project manager have in common with a terrorist negotiator? Well, if they’re both doing their jobs right, they’re driving specific behaviours from the people with whom they’re working. That’s right, a hostage negotiator’s job is to get a terrorist to act in a way that the negotiator wants them to. Do [...]

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Okay, so yesterday I got a bit snarky and went on a terrible rant about poor Prince Humphrey and the abysmal negotiation tactics that got him into trouble. Today I wanted to calm things down and talk about negotiation a little bit. I have some specific suggestions for new negotiators that might help [...]

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So, I was just over on Elizabeth Harrin’s blog, rabidly trying to catch up on her posts (she’s one of my favourites) after crunch week at university. While I was there, I caught her piece, Is Project Management Training Really Effective?

In the post, she presents some research that indicates project [...]

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We all have things we’re known for. In my case, you give me a team that’s completely demoralized and dysfunctional, and I’ll turn it around and get it working effectively again. To that point, someone asked me a couple days ago, “Geoff I hear you’re really good at getting people to work together. How do [...]

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(A guest post by Rick Valerga, author of The Cure for the Common Project)

About a week ago, project management author Rick Valerga approached me through the blog to chat about social media. We hit it off right away and I immediately vomited a thousand random thoughts onto him. In retrospect, [...]

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So I’ve been looking rather unsuccessfully for work lately and one of the things that’s been really gnawing at me is the human resource black hole. We all know how it is…you contact an employer about a job and then never hear back. Recruiters are incredibly busy people so despite being out of work, we [...]

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The Ties That Bind

On April 10, 2011 By

I attended a funeral this weekend. It was for my father’s cousin at whose house I spent so much of my childhood. We weren’t particularly close–I haven’t seen her in years. However, I understand towards the end she became a shut-in, and when she died, she died alone. That made me very sad.

Like many [...]

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