True North pgs. Inc - Project Community

The Blind Men and the Elephant:

Mastering Project Work

By David A. Schmaltz

Published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
ISBN: 1-57675-253-4
Paperback Original $18.95
Number of Pages: 141
Available: April 2003

Click here to order the Blind Men and the Elephant

If you work, you probably manage projects every day - even if project manager is not in your official title - and you know how frustrating the experience can be. Using the familiar story of six blind men failing to describe an elephant to each other as a metaphor, David Schmaltz brilliantly identifies the true root cause of the difficulties in project work: incoherence (the inability of a group of people to make common meaning from their common experience).

Schmaltz exposes such oft-cited difficulties as poor planning, weak leadership, and fickle customers as poor excuses for project failure, providing a set of simple, project coherence-building techniques that anyone can use to achieve success. He explains how wickedness develops when a team over-relies on their leader for guidance rather than tapping their true source of power and authority - the individual.

The Blind Men and the Elephant explores just how much influence is completely within each individual's control. Using real-world stories, Schmaltz undermines the excuses that may be keeping you trapped in meaningless work, offering practical guidance for overcoming the inevitable difficulties of project work.

David Schmaltz has an extraordinary ability to decipher the human dynamics that destroy projects and damage relationships, and his insights and ideas reveal how to avoid these problems. Don't start your next project until you've read this book.

- Naomi Karten, author of Communication Gaps and How to Close Them

I appreciate his ability to paint a picture of project management that includes the most important ingredient - people. Understanding and integrating the concepts of this book will make managing projects and people a whole lot more fun.

- Chuck Kolstad, President and CEO, ANTARA.net

This book is pithy, insightful, and in places, profound. The ratio of ideas to paragraphs is quite high. Plan on reading it more than once.

- Randon L. Taylor, Lead Programmer Analyst, Standard Insurance Company

Be prepared for a journey of discovery into how your choices impact your effectiveness. A thought-provoking book about not only work projects, but effectiveness in other areas of life.

- Mark Lewis, Lieutenant Colonel (ret), United States Air Force

David A. Schmaltz is the founder of and principled consultant for True North project guidance strategies, http:// www.projectcommunity.com, a consulting firm dedicated to helping people work well together to create exceptional results.

You are the most powerful project management tool you will ever use.