Action 1: Shift

Action #1: Shift

Organizations need more project leaders and less project managers. Unfortunately, many organizations confuse the two. This confusion has resulted in the application of project management tools and techniques in a simplistic, linear manner. What project managers need to do is exercise a paradigm shift that emphasizes, to use a popularized phrase by Bennis and Nanus, doing the right the things rather than doing things right. This paradigm shift, in the true sense of Kuhn and Barker, requires taking a completely different perspective, a nonlinear and systemic one. Project management currently remains in the shackles of a paradigm that emphasizes doing things right, not necessarily the right things. It needs to become more like what Burns describes as more transformative , less transactional.