Wow! This is an awesome book. If you're involved in projects, I highly recommend it. If you aren't, yes you are - and so you should read it to find out why. This is a fast, fun-paced guide to making success out of projects by making them bigger, meaningful, important, and impassioned. Peters revs up his own energy and format, building his 50 tips around the stages of Create, Sell, Implement, and Exit. He includes lots of quotes and ideas from others ("Reward excellent failures; punish mediocre successes.") The successful project manager creates projects or re-frames them. They are endlessly curious. The success factor for a project, the constant criteria, is Wow! Using another criteria (paraphrasing from his recap of critic Claude Cernuschi's evaluation of art) set of 4 factors: Fashion (Was it cool?), Quality (Was it craft?), Originality (Is it novel?), and Influence (Was the path altered?). I've recommended this book numerous times since reading it. (

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jpsnow | May 1, 2008 |

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Epigraph

What we do matters to us. Work may not be the most important thing in our life or the only thing. We may work because we must, but we still want to love, to feel pride in, to respect ourselves for what we do and to make a difference. -- Sara Ann Friedman, Work Matters: Women Talk About Their Jobs and Their Lives

Dedication

Dick Anderson, former commanding officer, U.S. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion Nine, Danang, Republic of Vietnam, who taught me (Ensign T.J. Peters, CEC, USN, 693355) Can Do!*/WOW Projects! in 1966.

* Fact: The U.S. Navy Seabees' "Can Do!" preceded Nike's "Just Do It!" by 50 years.

James Carville, for "the campaign" as ultimate, high-stakes WOW Project.

Susan Sargent, Perk Perkins, and The Dream Team, "true believers" and against-all-odds creators of Hunter Park and Riley Rink, Southern Vermont's most extraordinary community facility.

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The White Collar Revolution is here.

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Amazon.com (ISBN 0375407731, Hardcover)

Does your work matter? Do you transform mundane tasks into "WOW Projects!"? And, most important, do you consider projects "dynamic, stimulating, a major bond builder with co-workers, a source of buzz among end-users, and ... inspiring, exhausting, hot, cool, sexy, where everyone else wants to be"? If not, consider reading this enthusiastic project primer, which joins The Brand You50 and The Professional Service Firm50 in Tom Peters's list-filled Reinventing Work series.

Stressing the importance of following a project from start to finish, Peters breaks the WOW Project (also known as the "Way Cool" project, by the way) into four stages--create, sell, implement, and exit--and 50 lists. No. 24 (titled "Work on BUZZ ... all the time!") recommends making a stir about the "WOW-worthy project," showing off your team's success with buttons, mugs, and T-shirts. Shameless? Perhaps. But if the project is truly worthy, then "parading your team's spunk is a matchless sales/marketing--not to mention morale-building--ploy."

Peters--who communicates in lists, one-word sentences, bold, capitalized, and half-tone text, parenthetical asides with jumpy punctuation, and more than a few interjections of "WOW!" and "Way cool!"--is not for everyone. Mellow readers may want, instead, to check out Eric Verzuh's The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management. But project managers seeking to shake up mundane assignments will find plenty of original, easy-to-implement ideas in this guide to getting things done. --Rob McDonald

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:22 -0400)

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