Recently, I wrote about your Christmas dinner as a project management exercise. But now that it’s just about Christmas, I’ve realized that the real project management guru of the season is Santa himself. What a project: Making toys for good little girls and boys and then delivering them in one night. Can you imagine the complexity that a project like that would have?
Number crunching
First, let’s think of the numbers: According to The Economist’s Pocket World in Figures, there are about 6.4 billion people in the world and about 28% of them of them are under 15 years old. Using some broad assumptions about the age of kids who believe in Santa (let’s say 10 and under), along with the understanding that not every child in the world lives in a country or practices a religion that recognizes the fat jolly man (let’s say three quarters to be safe, but it’s probably far more), I’m estimating about 300,000,000 children get toys from Santa each year.
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This blog post was on my list of “things to write about” for two weeks now, but I’ve been busy with other things. That’s okay, though, because it’s a perennial topic.
I was recently reading a blog in the New York Times (published October 15th) by a CEO of a NY-based company. She referenced that, in a previous blog (published October 7th), she had written about ways to bypass high-priced agencies and run your own PR. And in that blog, someone had shared with her a brilliant piece of wisdom which sounds like something I tell people every day: In essence, the commenter said “you’re already busy as a CEO; why do the PR yourself as well? Focus on your core competencies to build your business and leave PR to someone else.” Read her original October 7th blog, entitled “Which PR Firm Do You Use?” .
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If you follow me on twitter you have seen a ton of recent tweets about @emailcenterpro, about ‘click – click – move – move’, and about Inbox 0!
Some of you may be wondering: How I am doing that? Others may already know because you subscribe to my Tips in 10 email newsletter. I won’t write it out in detail (but if you want to get the step by step instructions, just subscribe to my Tips in 10 newsletter using the sign-up form on the right hand side of this blog post).
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It doesn’t matter what size of company you are or what size of project you’re working on, most of us have faced this situation at one time or another: We have a project that is going well and then it sputters and stalls. Days turn into weeks and the project lags. There are plenty of reasons that this could happen. Here are a few top reasons and what to do about them.
Delegation that has fallen through the cracks: If you’re relying on something from someone else, and they’re not delivering, you need to get things moving by nudging them, then pushing them, then threatening them (in that order). If possible, continue on with other aspects of the project. At some point, you may need to replace them and that’s something you should start working on between the “push them” and “threaten them” stage.
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Great discussion today on #businesslunchclub (on Twitter; but see BusinessLunchClub.com for more details).
The conversation today centered around delegation, and specifically around something that @IAC_Heather calls “the 3 Strikes, You’re Out” rule. The conversation was primarily between @IAC_Heather, @askleo, and myself (@AaronHoos), with @Hazewalker chiming in towards the end.
You can read our entire conversation on BusinessLunchClub (If you’re not reading this on the day it’s posted, go to BusinessLunchClub.com/users/archive and select July 13 from the calendar).
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With the coaching I do here and the services that IAC Professionals offers, it’s no secret that I’m a believer in delegation. It makes good business sense to delegate, especially when the person you’re delegating to costs less to do the task than the equivalent of your own hourly rate.
A small business owner might contract with a virtual assistant to take on some of the administrative work, and a large business might delegate its day-to-day functions down from the executive to middle management (or its sales functions to a sales team or its manufacturing functions to the factory, etc.), however, there remains one function that cannot be delegated; it MUST be done by the business leader:
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