Chapter 1 starts the book with a scene of a meeting between managers.
the top manager decided to make a think tank of young guys.
he presenting them with the biggest threat endangering the future of the company.
he starts describing the problem. he talks about the typical sales over time curve of products. he said there's a rise, a leveling off, and a decline. he said that their products aren't following that curve. it looks more like a triangle. it's the new products that are causing older products to drop off in sales as soon as they reach their high point.
the young guy thinks maybe that's the problem. maybe they shouldn't be putting out their newer products so quickly after the older models.
I think that depends on what happening in the rest of the market.
Correct. The frantic race in the market forces us to launch a t new generation of modems every six months or so.
a bit later we learn that development time for a product is 2 years and they have to roll out a new model every 6 months.
and the think tank was tasked to figure out how to dramatically decrease the development time.
---------------------
Chapter 2
The book switches gears. The scene and subject matter are totally different. It's about a guy who was assigned to teach an executive MBA class (where the students are actual managers of companies) about a subject that hasn't been decided yet.
He was chosen for the task because he's a good teacher.
His good teaching is described as...
“I chose you because of your unique style of teaching," he surprises me.
"Teaching through open discussion?" I'm astonished.
“Yes," he says categorically. "For this program I'm more and more convinced that that is the only prudent way. The students have the relevant day-to-day experience. Open debate, steering a group of people to develop the know-how themselves, is how we should teach them. And I don't have many instructors who are both willing and know how to do it."
Then the decision-maker assigned the class reminded the professor of some advice from the past...
“Not to bite off too much," I remind him. "To forget the dreams about changing the world and take on a subject I could finish."
I think this means: don't make your near term goals be beyond your current skill such that you can't achieve them. but it's ok to have huge long term goals, but you don't need to think about them much while you're working on your near term goals. (some thinking has to go into it though, cuz like you don't want your near term goals to be incompatible with your long term goals.)
The chapter ends with the choice to teach a class (and do research) on project management because that field hasn't had a great improvement in decades.
No comments:
Post a Comment