Gathering Leading-Edge Ideas
As you progressed through the skill sets, I’m sure you saw that the
subjects were not only getting deeper, they were getting broader as
well. At this point, breadth and depth are infinite.
There are many experts in project management who are advancing
the field. But there are also experts in other fields, such as mathematics,
psychology, and sociology, who have ideas that are applicable to our
field. There are good ideas in places we never dreamed that could contribute
to our discipline. Now, you have the visibility that can make farreaching
contributions to project management in your company and
perhaps in other places as well.
At this point, it is imperative that you keep up with what’s going
on around you. Your attention should be drawn to reading such books
as Rethinking the Future by Rowan Gibson, Alvin Toffler, and Heidi Toffler
and The Strategy-Focused Organization by Robert S. Kaplan and David
P. Norton. You should attend such seminars as Developing and Executing
a Customer-Centric Strategy and question the application of Knowledge
Management to what’s going on in your organization. By all means
these are not the only areas you should investigate; these are presented
here just to give some idea of the kinds of directions your interests may
take at this point.
At the outset of this book and many times later, I said that project
management is an evolving discipline. It is not today what it was yesterday,
and it will not be tomorrow what it is today. The evolution comes
from leading-edge ideas. At first, these ideas are ‘‘soft’’; that is, they
are conceptual. As they grow and evolve, however, they become more
‘‘firm.’’