influence

The topic of leadership is on the forefront of most, if not all, organizations these days. It’s one of the most talked about and yet least understood topics in the business world. Today I entered the generic term “leadership” in a Google search and it came back with more than 462,000 results. When I changed [...]

I’d like to start things off in this posting with a joke I heard on the US Television show, Two and a Half Men. Now keep in mind that the show is full of gratuitous innuendo and juvenile comedy, much of it not easily translatable in (nor suitable for) the context of project management.  In [...]

The ability to influence people is a good skill for a project manager. Isn’t it?
Isn’t it our job as PMs to influence people on the project? To find ways to get our stakeholders onboard?

Could it be that one person’s influencing can be another’s political manipulation?

I was recently working with some relatively young (well, pretty much everyone seems to be younger these days) software developers beginning to make a transition into project management.  As we were going over some of the PM responsibilities and tools, one of them asked, “A lot of this sounds like selling.  Don’t we want to [...]