Welcome to Hashtag Trending, the Weekend Edition. I’m your host Jim Love.
A number of years ago, a client of mine said to me, “I have no idea what you do, but where you’re here, stuff gets done.” He actually didn’t say stuff, but you might be playing this podcast with your family listening, so let’s stay PG rated.
The point is that not a lot of people know how to get things done. It is an undervalued but important skill in business.
Another example – I taught at the University of Waterloo for a while and I remember a successful CEO came in talked our class about how his company had taken on some big players and won. He’d made tens of millions of dollars.
He got questions like “what was your strategy?” He explained it. It seemed simple. Powerful. The next question was “how did you come up with that?”
His answer surprised us all. He said, “we read a book.” Which leads to an obvious next question. “What book?”
His answer has stuck with me for years. He said, “it didn’t matter.” By the time any book got to be published my a major publisher, it was going to be pretty good. The difference with us wasn’t the strategy. It’s that we actually DID IT.”
Execution. We disdain it. We somehow think that great ideas are what makes the difference when getting stuff done is much more important.
And I take nothing away from the intelligence or the strategic thinking of my guest this week, but one of the things I most admire about him, is his attention to getting stuff done.
My guest is Yogi Schulz, author of a new book A Project Sponsor’s Warp Speed Guide.
If you are thinking that the world doesn’t need another book on project management – you might be right. But Yogi has written this book not from the point of view of the project manager. He’s written it for the project sponsor.
He makes the point that so many project managers know all too well – executives often don’t understand how valuable performing this project sponsor role can be. Nor do they really know what to do. Or as Yogi says in this interview, “we’ve spent a lot of time and money training project managers and next to no time training project sponsors.”
The book itself is an easy read, and it’s set up to read all at once, or to provide quick snippets of “just in time guidance” to a project sponsor.
Join me for my conversation with Yogi Schulz, author of A Project Sponsor’s Warp Speed Guide. You can find his book on Amazon and it may make the appropriate gift for the executive sponsor of your next project, or for anyone listening who is that executive sponsor.
Hashtag Trending goes to air five days a week with a daily tech newscast. And every weekend we have a special in depth interview with a person or on a topic of interest – hopeful both.
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Our recording engineer is Midori Nagai. Our associate producer is Krystle McLean. And I’m your host, Jim Love.
Thanks for sharing your weekend with us.