One of
the tenets in The 80/20 Principle, is
to “impose an impossible time scale” for project management. With an impossible
time scale, author Richard Koch writes, people will identify the 20 percent
solutions that will bring 80 percent benefit.
Last
night (10/21/09), on the NewsHour with
Jim Lehrer, I heard a real-life example of this. Judy Woodruff interviewed
Steven Rattner, described as the man behind the overhaul and rescue of Detroit’s auto companies.
He has an article out in Fortune
magazine outlining his role. What I found most intriguing was how he described
the impossibility of the project.
He says,
“The whole thing was -- was very traumatic, because I almost didn't take this
job, as I wrote in the piece, because I looked at the situation, and I said,
these companies are going to run out of money in a couple months. Bankruptcy is
generally a multiyear process.
It was
not -- it wasn't clear we were going to be able to restructure these companies.
They had tried for -- people had tried for years to restructure these
companies, and failed. How were we going to manage to do this in a couple of
months?
But it's
-- it's a little like the saying, never let a crisis go to waste. The urgency
of this, the magnitude of the problem ultimately caused all the stakeholders to
recognize they had -- they had to help.”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec09/gm_10-21.html
