ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● DR. RUTH MIDDLETON HOUSE

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our every-other-week visit to talk about what matters to you as a professional project manager.  We like to talk about doing the stuff of project management:  how to get certified; how to create success and sustain it.  We talk with leaders in the industry and see what they’ve been doing and draw on their experience.

I’m your host, Nick Walker.  And with me are the in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, there’s a theme that comes up in our conversations from time to time, and that seems to be managing the unexpected.

ANDY CROWE:  It’s a fun thing.  And you know what, Nick, there are so many examples of things not going to plan.  As Eisenhower said, “The plan is nothing, but planning is everything.”  You’ve got to be waiting for who-knows-what to come your way.  So we’re excited about our guest today.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah, let’s talk about our guest.  She is Dr. Ruth Middleton House.  She’s president and lead consultant of Middleton-House & Company.  She specializes in troubleshooting high-risk, high-visibility projects in multibillion-dollar partnerships and joint ventures, on down to small business ventures.  She’s an educator, an author; and, Ruth, we consider ourselves privileged to have you here.  Welcome to Manage This.

RUTH HOUSE:  Thank you.  I’m just delighted to be here.  You’re right, Andy, so often so much depends on how we manage that instantaneous thing that we did not see coming.  And as an example, I’d like to go back about 700 years.

ANDY CROWE:  You’ve been at this a while, but that’s a surprise.

RUTH HOUSE:  When he said “experienced,” he meant what he said.  It was at about that time that a fictional character emerged named Mullah Nasruddin.

NICK WALKER:  Whoa, whoa, whoa.  Mullah Nas...

RUTH HOUSE:  Mullah Nasruddin.  Mullah’s a title.  Like in the rural South he would be called Reverend Smith or Pastor Jones, probably.

NICK WALKER:  Can we call him “Moe”?

BILL YATES:  Moe, I like that.

RUTH HOUSE:  That’ll throw me off, so I’ll call him Mullah; but you can call him Moe if you want to.  And the story, this story, about Mullah illustrates some truths about culture which changes as circumstances change that are very important for us to remember today.  Now, Mullah was out working in his field when a messenger from a nearby town came and handed him a written invitation to come to the great hall and dine with the prince.

Well, Mullah was so excited, he dropped his tools right where he was, headed straight for the hall.  But when he arrived there with his threadbare turban and his dirty tunic on from working in the fields, the guards said, “No way.  Not only are you not going into the hall, I don’t even want you hanging around here on the outside.  You just go back home where you belong.”

Well, Mullah was insulted that he had not been treated like the very important person he knew himself to be.  But he went home.  He bathed in perfumed oil.  He wrapped his head in his finest silk turban.  And he dressed in his finest tunic and went right back to the great hall.  This time he received a warm welcome and was even ushered inside and seated right next to the prince.  Well, in those days he would have been seated around a beautiful Persian rug, right next to the prince.  That rug was just covered with huge bowls of beautifully prepared food.

Mullah ate and ate and ate until he had had his fill.  Then he reached a hand into one bowl, grabbed some food, and rubbed it into his tunic.  He reached to another bowl, grabbed some food, and rubbed it into his tunic.  Reached for a third bowl, grabbed some food, and rubbed it in his tunic.  Everyone fell silent around him, and all eyes were on him.

Finally the prince couldn’t stand it anymore.  And he said, “Mullah Nasruddin, you must have strange eating habits where you come from.  Why are you rubbing your food into your clothes?”  Mullah looked straight into the prince’s eye and said, in good Dilbert form, “Well, actually, when you think about it, it’s my clothes that were allowed into the hall.  It only seems right to give them their fair share of the food.”

Now, and there’s some truth to that.  The measures that are placed on us may not be the ones we expect, may be something very different.  But there are three real truths about culture that this story illustrates.  First, there are rules for everything – what you know, what you do, how you feel.  That gets into what reports you get to read, who you get to talk to, who you make eye contact with, what you eat, how you eat.  There are ground rules for everything.

The second truth is many of these rules are not written or spoken.  And an even scarier corollary to that is that sometimes the rules that are written and spoken are in direct conflict with the ones that are actually practiced in the organization.

BILL YATES:  Right, right.

RUTH HOUSE:  Now, the third truth about culture is that, if you don’t follow the ground rules, you don’t get invited to the party.  And it doesn’t matter – ignorance is no excuse.  It doesn’t matter if you didn’t know the ground rules.  If you don’t follow them, you don’t get invited to the party.  Now, notice that, in this case, Mullah learned one ground rule, and that was the dress code.  So he got into the party.  But after he broke the dining ground rules, he was probably not going to be invited back.  I don’t think I would have invited him back.  But that’s not enough for you.  When you are in a situation where all of the old rules have changed, then it’s important that you get invited again and again unless you choose to turn the invitation down yourself.

ANDY CROWE:  I really liked his response when he got turned away, as he went back, and he put on everything just exactly the right way.  It kind of goes with my philosophy:  Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

RUTH HOUSE:  There you go.  And he did, yes, he did overdo that.

ANDY CROWE:  And it worked.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

RUTH HOUSE:  And it worked.  It got him, yeah, it got him in, yeah.

BILL YATES:  And I’m thinking of a company I worked for for a number of years was EDS.  And EDS was headquartered in Plano, Texas.  And the headquarters was quite elaborate.  It was like going to the prince’s quarters, if you will.

RUTH HOUSE:  Right.

BILL YATES:  And there was an executive suite called the “God Pod.”  And you had to be dressed a certain way if you were going to go to the God Pod.

ANDY CROWE:  Wow.

RUTH HOUSE:  That’s very interesting.  And the tricky thing is, when we’re going through a merger or an acquisition or a reorg, or if there’s new leadership above us, we may not know that this other space is now the God Pod and may inadvertently show disrespect for it or not be wearing the right clothes or the right attitude when we go into it.  That was the case – let’s fast-forward 700 years.  And that was the case in an organization that I belonged to.  I was a project manager in a small but very, very financially successful organization.  And we actually bought out an organization that was in financial trouble.  But it had a huge number of people.  Probably they were three times as large as us, employee-wise.

Now, we project managers were in the acquiring company.  We were the ones that came to the table with money.  So we thought, this is all right.  They haven’t been successful, but we can show them how to be successful.  They’ll adopt our ground rules.  They’ll do as we do.  Everything will be great.  Well, we were mistaken.  We did not realize that, for our ownership, this acquisition was an exit strategy.  Eighteen months later, all of our old leadership sold out and either retired or resigned.  The leadership we were left with was the leadership of the company that was in financial trouble, and they did what they knew how to do.  They got us all into...

ANDY CROWE:  Into financial trouble.

RUTH HOUSE:  ...financial trouble, yeah.  And it was very frustrating for those of us who had come from the acquiring company to be in this situation.  We kept doing what we knew how to do to provide good service to our clients.  But it got to be harder and harder and harder.  And finally it just seemed impossible.  So most of us either retired or resigned.  We got out somehow so we could live up to our own standards.

Now, that wasn’t the outcome we wanted.  But, you know, it actually wasn’t all bad for us because we did a couple of things right.  And these are things I want to call to your attention.  Number one, we couldn’t control that situation.  But we could control the way we responded to it.  And we did a good job of that.  We accepted responsibility for our own behavior.  You wouldn’t have heard any of us saying, “Well, they made me do that,” even though it was the wrong thing to do.  You wouldn’t have heard any of us saying, “Well, I had no choice.”  We knew we had a choice.  We were breathing.  And we had choices.  And over and over again we chose to do what we believed to be the right thing.

In fact, in that situation, I kind of saw myself – my image of myself was an image of a lightning rod.  So rather than strike with the anger or the frustration that I felt towards other people, I saw my job as taking the heat and then grounding it so that I was not burned, and neither were the people around me.  Now, being straight meant we told the truth.  But we did that without being accusatory.  For example, I could say, “I’m confused.  I thought we agreed yesterday that this was going to happen.  But today it looks like this other thing’s happening instead.”  Or I might say, “I don’t understand why we’re approaching the problem in this way.”

BILL YATES:  Ruth, one of the things that I’m thinking of in this scenario, how did you interact with your customers?