Fanatic Risk Acceptance: A Tragic Tale One Century Later

I found it very ironic that last week I was co-facilitating a session on Risk Management as part of the Project Management Institute Upstate New York Chapter’s PMP Exam Prep class. As defined in the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) one of the inputs to the Plan Risk Management process is Enterprise Environmental Factors.  The PMBOK defines this input as:

“The enterprise environmental factors that can influence the Plan Risk Management process include, but are not limited to, risk attitudes and tolerances that describe the degree of risk that an organization will withstand.”

As part of the exam prep session we review the need to understand which project constraints (time, cost, scope, or quality) organizations and sponsors are most sensitive, to be used as an input in the process of ranking project risks. For example if you are working on a project which your organization’s CEO or state’s Governor has publically announce a date for deployment, your project will be more sensitive to risks that would impact the schedule.

Situations Matter: A Q&A with author Sam Sommers

Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World is the highly acclaimed book by Sam Sommers which provide an exploration of the invisible forces influencing your life-and how understanding them can improve everything you do. I recently had a chance to connect with Sam and ask him a few questions about his insightful book.

Thanks Sam for taking time from your busy schedule to answer these questions.

Q: Why did you write Situations Matter?

A: My goal in writing the book was to bring renewed attention to just how influential context is in our daily lives: the ways in which it shapes how we think, what we do, and who we are as people. I know it seems like an obvious premise-- of course the situations we're in matter. But we don't come close to grasping the full extent to which this is the case or just how far-reaching the implications of this conclusion really are. My argument in the book is that by learning about the science of how contexts shape human nature we become more effective people across a wide range of domains, both professionally (e.g., working in groups, managing people, negotiations) and personally (e.g., parenting, social relationships, how we think about the self). So it's very much a story about the psychology of daily life, which makes it useful as well as fun-- it's an integration of behavioral science, pop culture analysis, personal anecdote, and humor, all in the effort to paint a more complete picture of what makes people tick.

The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha

Are you an entrepreneur? Yes you are, or should be thinking of yourself as an entrepreneur if not already doing so is the case that Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha make in their new book The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career.  Hoffman, a former employee of Google and Paypay, is more widely recognized as a co-founder to Linked-In, the largest professional social network on the internet. Ben Casnocha is an accomplished author and entrepreneur.

The authors open the book by describing how much the world of work has changed in the last generation. Because company pension plans are now rarer then unassisted triple plays, more and more senior employees are postponing retirement which ultimately results in fewer opportunities for managers to continue their climb up the corporate ladder. Additionally fewer companies are able to provide their employees with training they need to make them more marketable.

Island of Vice by Richard Zacks

Who is “Ted-dy” Roos-e-velt?

First in war, first in peace.

First to reform the New York Police.

This is how Theodore Roosevelt, then a New York City Police Commissioner, was greeted by a thousand University of Chicago students before giving a speech on George Washington’s birthday. The ironic revelation of this greeting, as noted by Richard Zacks in his new book Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York, is that at this time Roosevelt was more popular outside New York City than within the city he was cleaning up. Zacks is the author of several books including; The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805 and The Pirate Hunter.