Episode 18 — Thor, The Norse God of Project Management

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● JOEL “THOR” NEEB NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every two weeks we get together to discuss the things that matter to you as a professional project manager.  We talk about project management certification and doing the job of a project manager, and we hear from some of the leaders in the industry.  I’m your host Nick Walker, and with me are our in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And by the way, on the day we’re recording this, Andy, you’re getting ready to deliver the keynote address at PMI Honolulu. ANDY CROWE:  I am heading out to Honolulu to be at that chapter.  I’ve been there before, and I’m really excited.  I’m talking about the Talent Triangle, which is getting a lot of buzz within PMI:  the technical, the leadership, and the strategy triangle and how that applies to our own career. NICK WALKER:  And, by the way, our guest today is delivering the opening keynote in a few days at the Project Management Institute’s Global Congress for North America in San Diego.  And this is a guy who probably has enough fascinating stories that we could probably sit here for hours and never exhaust them all.  It’s amazing how you find these guys.  I’m really looking forward to this today.  Our guest is Joel Neeb.  His friends call him Thor.  Are we friends enough to call you Thor? JOEL NEEB:  I definitely think so, yeah, absolutely. NICK WALKER:  Okay.  Okay.  Well, Thor, welcome to Manage This.  We are fortunate to have you here with us. JOEL NEEB:  Thanks, Nick.  It’s a real pleasure to be here. NICK WALKER:  Now, before we begin, let me give just a quick rundown of your background for our listeners.  Thor was an F-15 pilot.  He escorted the U.S. President through the sky.  He flew missions to ensure the safety of our country after the attacks of 9/11.  He was a technical leader of 300 of the most senior combat pilots in the Air Force.  He’s a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas.  He’s now the president of Afterburner, leading a team of more than 70 elite military professionals, and with them has trained almost two million business professionals and fostered elite teams for Fortune 100 companies, companies in the tech industry, finance, medical devices, and several NFL teams.  We could keep going.  But we want to stop there and give you time to talk to us.  Thor, first of all, why Thor?  I’ve got to know that. JOEL NEEB:  So, you know what, for every call sign there’s two versions of the story.  The version one is safe for public consumption, and we could tell that right now, which is Thor and the Thor’s Hammer.  I was an instructor, and so I was known as “The Hammer” as the instructor.  And then there also is a two-beverage minimum version of the story which is a little less flattering for me and probably pretty embarrassing and sounds a lot less cool than the first version of the story.  But it’s a lot of fun. NICK WALKER:  Does it have anything to do with your chiseled Greek god looks? JOEL NEEB:  It definitely does not, at that point.  There’s an embarrassing story associated with it, like every good call sign should have. NICK WALKER:  Okay, okay.  Well, we’ll just have to go into that one after the mics are off. JOEL NEEB:  There you go. NICK WALKER:  Okay.  Well, first of all, tell us the concept of Afterburner.  How do fighter pilots speak into the world of project management? JOEL NEEB:  Well, you know, in my world, Nick, I was flying Mach 2.  I had 350 instruments in front of me.  I was going in and out of the clouds.  I had four, sometimes seven wingmen flying with me at any given point in time.  And I have to manage this complex universe and figure out, as I’m going inside and in and out of the clouds, how to keep these wingmen from running into each other, how to keep them from running into the mountain up ahead, and then also how to achieve at our mission.  And so we had to be able to distill this incredibly complex universe down into just a few key components that we can manipulate at any given point in time, right, the critical things within my cockpit, because I can’t look at 350 instruments and dials.  I can’t watch all seven wingmen at one time.  What are the two or three things that we should be focusing on paying attention to, to stay safe and to stay successful? And so that’s the same type of business concepts we approach to organizations.  We help them as they navigate, how do I wade through this complex universe as the business cycle shifted from seven to three years, and I’ve got to go faster than I ever have in the past, and I have less time to enjoy the profits from my current product before I need to find the next one.  And so my project needs to take place faster than it did last year.  And this is an accelerated universe.  How do we manage all of that and figure out what key components are to manipulate? ANDY CROWE:  So, Thor, I want to wade in on this a little bit.  And by the way, I’ve soloed in a Cessna 172. JOEL NEEB:  Well done. ANDY CROWE:  Does that put me close to your level? NICK WALKER:  Oh, wow. ANDY CROWE:  Yeah; right? NICK WALKER:  We’ll get you a call sign. BILL YATES:  You guys, you’re peers, absolutely. ANDY CROWE:  I’ll skip the call sign, but thanks.  So I sat in a meeting very recently, and I’m going to strip out some of the details here.  But I sat in a meeting very recently with a very complicated dashboard in front of me.  It was not in this organization.  It was in a different organization, a very complicated dashboard, a lot of components and a lot of eye candy.  And when you’re talking about 350 dials and instruments, this is sort of resonating with me.  So people were overwhelmed with this dashboard. JOEL NEEB:  Sure. ANDY CROWE:  But they were also enamored by it. BILL YATES:  Hmm. ANDY CROWE:  They were oohing and aahing and talking about how great this was.  And in my mind I’m thinking, okay, how is this actionable at all?  So, okay.  You walk into an organization, and they have a complicated dashboard, a complicated set of metrics.  How do you trim that down?  How do you know what to focus on?  How do you decide? JOEL NEEB:  Well, if you don’t know what your ultimate end goal or your intended effect is, then you probably don’t want to trim down that dashboard right now; right?  So if I don’t have the end in mind, then maybe I need 350 instruments.  I don’t know yet.  So what we have to do first is build out that future.  Let’s all land on what does success look like in two to three years?  And I know you’re going to push back and say, well, you know, the market’s changing so fast.  How is that question even relevant?  Not really.  You’ll still have a solid North Star.  If we can determine where you’re going in two to three years, I’m telling you, over the next year or two, things will change, and your path will change to get there.  But your ultimate destination won’t. Once we know that destination, we call it the “high-definition destination” in our world, then we can retrace our steps and figure out what are the critical tactical steps to take right now.  And then it becomes a lot easier to say, well, I don’t need these 200 instruments over here, then.  If all I’m doing is this to pursue this type of destination, then I probably don’t need to look over at this side of the cockpit. ANDY CROWE:  Or I don’t need to look every week or every month, certainly. JOEL NEEB:  Yup, yeah.  There’s nothing wrong with having that scorecard that allows you to have access to it.  It’s just knowing which ones are the most relevant. ANDY CROWE:  And you know the interesting thing here is you start to connect back to what are those dials and levers that are going to move those things, that are going to govern and change. JOEL NEEB:  Exactly. ANDY CROWE:  So it’s not just an act of monitoring.  It’s an act of figuring out, okay, what do I do to move the needle? NICK WALKER:  I see the parallels between the F-15 piloting and project management.  We’re talking about focus.  We’re talking about knowing what the mission is, really. JOEL NEEB:  Knowing what the mission is, and then what are the leading indicators, what are the instruments that are leading indicators that’ll help me affect those lagging indicators for success down the road. NICK WALKER:  So let’s talk a little bit more about focus.  How can project managers get better at locking in on the most important tasks? JOEL NEEB:  So going back to the concept of beginning with the end in mind, first of all, let’s determine what that mission objective is going to be.  What is the line in the sand that defines success?  And we don’t need to do this, once we determine what the two-year North Star looks like, we can back that into a two-month mission objective.  And this is where people generally push back and say, well, timeout, you know, I don’t have a flight like you do.  I don’t take off and land, and I get to have a nice clear start and finish to my mission.  And I say, sure, I’ll give you that.  But I bet you have an idea of what success would look like on September 30th.  I bet you have some semblance in your mind of where you’d like to be.  Why not align your team on that right now so that you can work backwards into the instruments you should be looking at. ANDY CROWE:  Outstanding. BILL YATES: I’ve got a question along those lines.  I know, not only did you fly, but you also were an instructor.  So you had to step back into the experience that you had when you were overwhelmed with too much information. JOEL NEEB:  Right. BILL YATES:  And think, okay, this is how I was trained and how I learned how to focus on the big, you know, the top two, top three.  And then, thinking about our project managers,