Situations Matter by Sam Sommers: A Review

Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World is a new book by Sam Sommers whose goal is to demonstrate how situations influence our thoughts and behaviors. The book more than accomplishes this goal by also providing techniques to interpret situations that are influencing behaviors and providing techniques to better respond to these situations.

The author starts by recounting an experience in which he and his wife missed a connecting flight and how he interpreted the situation to negotiate a hotel voucher from the airlines customer service agent. In this case the author explains how he considered the situation in which the agent was operating to successfully frame his request. The lesson is that the agent is not a heartless ogre who did not want to assist the stranded travelers but instead an amicable person who was put in a tough situation by the airline. This discussion is very well aligned with the powerful negotiation techniques presented by Stuart Diamond in Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World.

Sommers then discusses why, when presented with three game show hosts to tutor our child, we would immediately pick a certain one since he is viewed as more knowledgeable based on the game show that he hosts.

The remainder of the book covers several specific situational topics as I outline below.

WYSISYG – What you see is what you get. In this chapter, Sommers explains how we respond to what we see and discusses why we do not typically analyze and interpret the specific situation. In particular there is a discussion on how westerners will focus on a main object in a picture while those from eastern cultures look at the entire picture- frame and all! The most interesting analogy I found in this section was comparing the 2006 Olympics Opening Ceremony in Atlanta with the 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony in China. As you may recall the 2008 games in China opened with 2008 people playing the drums while the 2006 games in Atlanta opened with a single performer – Celine Dion. Interesting insight indeed!

Help Wanted – In this chapter Sommers explores the perplexing reasons of why people in crowds will not assist those in need. Many real life examples along with results of studies (including the famous Good Samaritan study conducted at Princeton University) demonstrate that we will shirk responsibility when we are in the mix of a crowd as opposed to being alone.

Sommers also provides his insights onto the infamous lack of crowd response to the extended assault on Kitty Genovese in Queens during 1964. This is the classic case study of crowds which analyzed in many other books include Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Overall this chapter is an impressive synopsis as to why crowds affect our responses and behaviors.

Go with the Flow – This section introduces the Crows Whisperer aka ‘Super Fan’. This is the guy at sporting events who gets you to break out of the norms and scream passionately for your team. The most important take a ways from this chapter are techniques that can help you break yourself and others from the crowd affect that paralyze us during emergencies.

You are Not Who You Think You Are – In this section, Sommers presents evidence that we not only view others differently given the situation, but we also view ourselves differently. The results of several research experiments show that depending on our location and context we will identify ourselves differently. The author also gives great advice on how we should view ourselves as opposed to how many ‘self help’ experts try to convince us to view ourselves. Overall this is a well written and very insightful chapter for understanding how we view ourselves.

Love and Hate – The final two chapter address how and when we love and hate are both influenced by situations. In the love section Sommers outlines the situational influences that affect who we end up choosing to date and marry as opposed to the traits we seek in a mate.

In my opinion, the chapter on Hate is the most important in the book. Finally, someone has addressed why we have a hard time initially distinguishing people within different ethnic backgrounds. This is a critical concept for anyone to understand when they interact and work with people who we do not classify within one of our ‘in groups’. This section also provides useful lessons for Project Managers who need to manage a team that consists of different groups, organizations or backgrounds.

My conclusion is this is a great book for helping to remind us that when viewing and judging the actions of others we need to consider their situation. It’s main strength is that it also provides insights and strategies for dealing with the potential harm of crowd affects along with overcoming biases, both our own and others.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who interacts with other people. For further reading on these topics I also recommend reviewing the author’s blog.

Check out other reviews on Amazon<<<

Your ‘One Click’ Review of Richard Brandt’s Amazon.com book

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com is a new book by Richard Brandt which delivers an overview of Amazon.com and its founder Jeff Bezos. Although this is a well written overview on both subjects, in my opinion these are both amazing stories that deserve their own more complete books.

Brandt starts with an overview on the background and upbringing of Jeff Bezos. It was interesting to learn of the technical achievements that Jeff attained during his younger years. I did not realize that Jeff is a technical whiz; I always assumed he was an expert on retail or book selling!

Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 3

My family and I have recently returned from our first trip to Disney World and I wanted to share our fun and some Best Practice for planning a trip to Disney World. This is the third of three entries which will provide a hopefully fun overview of our trip and how I applied simple Project Management techniques to ensure a successful vacation.

Execution – Manage the plan (Enjoy the trip, but keep refining the plan!)
After 11 months of planning the big day was finally upon us. We woke at 3:45 am to make our 6:30 am flight and arrived in Orlando on schedule. Since we had used the on-line service to pre-check in to the resort and indicated our planned arrival time, our room was ready and shortly our bags were brought directly to our rooms. Disney has customer service down to a science!

After a quick lunch it was time to hit Epcot and Soarin’. But my daughter had been hesitant all day and finally decided that we should visit the Honey I Shrunk the Kids attraction first. “No problem, honey” I said as my mind raced again! Let’s see... Honey I Shrunk the Kids is at Hollywood Studios not Epcot. Okay another change but again we adjusted accordingly.

As we entered Hollywood Studios we came across another opportunity. A family was leaving the park for the day and offered us their Fast Pass tickets to Toy Story Mania – which happened to be on our list of attractions to visit! If you are in the situation of leaving a park before you can use your Fast Pass please consider passing them along to someone else, it really adds to their day!

So we finish visiting Honey I Shrunk the Kids just in time for the afternoon parade and we start exploring the park. We quickly found Handy Manny and Jake signing autographs and taking pictures. One problem, we had not yet purchased autograph books. My wife saved the day by quickly finding a nearby store and purchasing two autograph books. Lesson learned – make sure to have your autograph books as soon as you enter your first park.

During the Planning Phase Michelle, my wife, cautioned me that we were picking out more attractions they we would likely be able to visit. Wow, was she right! Although I did consider ride wait times, knew we wanted to stop and see characters at greeting spots, and attend parades and fireworks, I did not account for all these tasks in my schedule planning. For example I did not plan on the 90-minute wait time to meet Rapunzel, which we could not leave without doing.

One basic lesson that I have learned and preach in Project Management is that it is not the tasks that you estimate inaccurately that haunt you; it is the tasks that you don’t identify and estimate that will haunt you. For example if you planned a series of tasks for say 55 hours and they each take 60 hours it will not impact the project as much as the few dozen 10 hour tasks that you never identified and estimated.

The impact of our vacation was that we did not get to visit all of our must see activities. In the end of course this was not a problem since we put these missed items on our list for our next trip to Disney!

As this impact was evolving and since I wake up at 5:00 am everyday even on vacation I would take that time to re-plan the day’s parks and activities. In the PM world this is where you manage the triple project constraints – scope, schedule and budget.

In the middle of this project I determined that the effort to complete our scope was greater than planned. Since we could obviously not increase the schedule because the reservations were set and we could not extend our stay, we had to adjust scope. The solution was to further refine the list of must see attractions and focus on these. So each morning I would review options for parks and activities, including the pros and cons of each with the family (project team) so we could jointly determine our path for the day. For example on the last day we could do Soarin’ at Epcot but the extended ride wait time and travel time between parks would mean we would lose the chance for several rides at the Magic Kingdom. In the end we opted to spend the last day at the Magic Kingdom and never did make it to Soarin’, which is the first thing we will do on the next visit!

Important Best Practice – Review potential changes with the team and decide collectively. Project Managers should always look to consult and secure buy-in from all stakeholder groups before making changes to the project – simple change request processing. Aren’t project management techniques so useful in everyday life?

If you plan to visit Disney World during the holiday season you must see the Osborne Family Lights at Hollywood Studio – simply breath taking!

In short the trip went very well and everyone agreed it was our best vacation to date. All it took was a lot of planning and maintaining flexibility during project execution. This is a simple concept that can be applied to any project!

Closeout – Assess project performance (Document your trip!)
Home again! After an uneventful fight we arrive home in chilly Albany with memories to last a lifetime. But wait, the project (vacation) is not done yet! You need to first document your trip by making sure to download and capture all of your pictures. If you chose to purchase any Disney Photo Pass pictures you only have a limited amount of time.

I downloaded all the pictures from our cameras and immediately made back-up copies. This is a lesson learned from the horrific flooding that was experienced locally from Hurricane Irene. During the flooding we lost our computer but fortunately we were able to have all of the pictures recovered. Of course this was a very minor inconvenience compared to the devastation that impacted and continues to impact many local residences.

You also want to capture any lessons learned and best practices for your next trip, several of which I have shared here. For example we decided that next time we would stay at a deluxe resort for the entire trip – the fridge and DVD player are great benefits, along with the character visits to the hotel along and many other extras! I highly recommend the Animal Kingdom Lodge, especially if there are animal lovers in your family.

Finally, please consider writing and posting trip report to share your experiences and help others, such as on Mouse Planet.

I hope this have given you some insights on just a few of the ways we can apply simple PM technical to everyday activities such as vacation planning. Please feel free to share any comments.

Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 1
Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 2

Here are a couple great Disney World reference books which I recommend.

Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 2

My family and I have recently returned from our first trip to Disney World and I wanted to share our fun and some Best Practice for planning a trip to Disney World. This is the second of three entries which will provide a hopefully fun overview of our trip and how I applied simple Project Management techniques to ensure a successful vacation.

Initiation – Define overall parameters (Define what, when and how!)
This is the phase where you nail down the logistics of your stay and book your reservations.

Over the past ten years Deborah Snyder, a fellow ‘Paranoid Professional’, and I have taught Risk Management for the Upstate New York Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI). PMI considers a risk to be any event that can result in either a negative (risk) or position (opportunity) consequence. Many times students struggle with the concept of a positive risk and it is not always easy to cite examples of these opportunities. During this project I came across a great opportunity!

Before booking your reservations I advise that you visit various sites related to Disney World and sign up for mailing lists. As a result of being on a Disney mailing list I was alerted to Disney’s limited time offer for a 40% discount on room rates. Since the project budget had already been allocated, instead of saving the extra money we decided to upgrade our accommodations. Instead of staying all 4 nights at the All Star Movie value resorts we switched to 2 nights at the All Star Movie value resort and 2 nights at the Deluxe Animal Kingdom Lodge. Since these are both Disney resorts, the good people at Disney are more than happy to move your bags between resorts, they will pick them up from one room and deliver then directly to your new room. This was a great example of a project opportunity which increased the Quality of our vacation without adding any additional costs!

During Initiation, you will also book your travel plans, as we did for our airline tickets when they became available around 6 months prior to our trip.

Finally, you need to book any Disney World extras in advance. Reservations for the character dining experiences open in advance 6 months to the day. Tip – book them six months to the day in advance. We planned to dine at Cinderella’s Royal Table on our first night, so five months and 28 days before our arrival I called to make our 3 character dining experience reservations. Oh sorry I was told, Cinderella’s Royal Table was already sold out for the night we wanted! I quickly shuffled our dining plans around with the very patient Disney person and ended up reserving dinner at Cinderella’s Royal Table for our last night, which ended up being a perfect way to spend our last evening at Disney World.

Now that your reservations have been made and your overall project parameters are set you can dig into detailed planning!

Planning – Further define and refine project plans (Get into the activities!)
For the Planning phase of our Disney World vacation I focused on identifying the sights and activities that we wanted to experience on our trip. The last thing you want to do is arrive at Disney World and not know that to do first, or second, or after that. While sequencing and estimating activities is critical on every project, when planning your vacation activities you don’t want to get too detailed. Hey Project Managers, loosen up –you don’t need to plan the vacation hour by hour. Instead we took the approach of listing the activities that were of most interest and wanted to experience.

Again planning well in advance is the key. The Disney site along with various other sites will provide details on all the Disney World attractions and rides. I also purchase the Birnbaum's Walt Disney World 2012 for my daughter. We sent many hours together pouring over this guide to develop a list of attractions we had to see.


You also need to know the schedule for various park activities (parades and fireworks) on the days you will be visiting, along with the opening and closing times for each park. I had all this information captured in a spreadsheet but we also accessed this information using the free version of the Undercover Tourist Disney Application on my wife’s I-Phone.

So we now knew everything we wanted to see along with and the timing of the various attractions in each park. You also want to know what you are doing first so you don’t check into the resort and are then not sure which park bus to get on! So we let our daughter pick the first attraction and she selected the carousel at the Magic Kingdom to ride first. I used this information and the already booked dining reservations to map out a rough plan as to which parks to visit on which days. Great, our plan was done!

But wait! As every Project Manger knows we need to be prepared for changes sometimes before we even get to the Execution Phase. In this case, 2 days before we leave for Disney World my daughter changes her mind and decides she wants to ride Soarin’ first. “No problem, honey” I said as my mind raced. Let’s see Soarin’ is at Epcot not Magic Kingdom and is very popular so you need a Fast Pass if you want to avoid the hour plus wait. A short time later I had re-planned the park visits based on this change. Good, we are ready to execute our project!

Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 1
Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 3

Here are a couple great Disney World reference books which I recommend.

Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 1

My family and I have recently returned from our first trip to Disney World and I wanted to share our fun and some Best Practice for planning a trip to Disney World. This is the first of three entries which will provide a hopefully fun overview of our trip and how I applied simple Project Management techniques to ensure a successful vacation.

Tip # 1 - treat your trip to Disney World like a project! A Project Management colleague of mine, Steve Russo, wrote So ... You're Going to Disney World: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace the planning process, a great book about the Disney vacation planning process which I highly recommend.

Also I would like to acknowledge Jonathan Blake who used the Disney World vacation as a case study for a New York State Project Management Guidebook training session at the 2005 GTC-East, some of the concepts I borrowed for this article.

So here is the first entry of how I managed our Disney World trip using the standard Project Management Origination Phase.

Origination – Select your destination (Define where)
This is the project phase where you make your case and obtain everyone’s approval to select Disney World as the vacation destination. This sounds easy since I don’t know many 2 or 5 year olds who would not want to go to Disney World!

Seriously, there is a process to selecting your destination, given many other available vacation options, and deciding on initial project parameters. To facilitate decision making you want to develop a high-level budget and schedule. In our case we knew we wanted to visit Disney World but first we had to make sure it would fit within our vacation budget and during a time when it was not so hot we would end up as puddles on the sidewalk!

An initial decision is what time of the year to visit. Of course Disney World is open each and every day, but at this point you want to narrow down the preferred season and month for your visit. Steve’s book contains a very insightful chapter to help you pick the best time for your visit. We chose late December since the weather would be cooler and the crowds relatively smaller.

In determining the budget you need to consider at least four major components: travel, park costs, accommodations, and daily spending/extras.

First you need to estimate the length of your stay for planning purposes. We chose to stay for 5 days and 4 nights but you can select different durations and crunch the numbers for each different scenario.

Travel – In this case we had to determine if we wanted to fly or drive to Disney World. My preference was to drive, how else would the kids get to see Pedro’s South of the Border along the way? My wife had visions of National Lampoon’s Vacation and quickly convinced me that we had to fly. Once we made this decision it was quite easy to check some on-line sites to estimate roundtrip airline costs.

Park Costs – Again it is easy to identify the costs of passes from online sites such as Disney or Undercover Tourist. There are many options to choose from and we took the Park Hopper option so we could visit multiple parks each day, which we did.

Accommodations – Next you need to estimate your costs for accommodations. The first decision is if you want to stay inside or outside of the Disney World Report. We decided to stay in the Disney Resorts and of course there are many to choose from. We picked Disney’s All Star Movie value resort to help contain the overall project, I mean vacation, costs. Visit the Disney Accommodations site for all the options, keep in mind they offer different prices for the various seasons!


Daily Spending and Extras – At this point you need to estimate how much you will spend daily on food and souvenirs. At Disney World there are many options for eating and you can estimate process with a little research. The Undercover Tourist Disney Smart Phone web application shows menus and prices for all Disney World parks and some of the resort restaurants. This is a neat, free application and highly recommended if you have a smart phone.

There are endless extras that you can include to further enhance your Disney experience. In our case we selected three character dining experiences, a favorite in our family.

Estimate each of these components and make sure it fits within your budget. Is a visit to Disney World still looking acceptable? If so proceed directly to Initiation!

Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 2
Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 3