Project leadership - James Lewis

Probably no subject has been more studied and written about in business today than leadership. So why another book? The famous Standish Group survey conducted every year reports that about 80 percent of all information system projects have problems meeting schedules, budgets, or performance requirements, and one-third of them have such serious problems that they are actually canceled. These statistics are not unusual for other areas of business as well. Given the staggering failure rate of projects today, project leadership skills have never been more important. Project Leadership draws on Jim Lewis's exhaustive review of the massive literature on leadership combined with his in-the-trenches experience in leading project teams. One objective of this book is to raise the awareness of project mangers to the need to go beyond management to leading their teams. They forget that projects are people. Lewis echoes Peter Drucker's statement that the job of a manager is to make workers productive by enabling them. This is one of the important roles of a project leader as well.;Secondly, the book will explain what leadership is all about and offer principles that individuals can apply to make their projects more successful, such as having a compelling vision, making the goal important to team members, setting expectations, and leading by example. Unlike other technical books on the market in the area of project management, this book is written to be accessible and useful to any business reader. The principles of leadership are not as precise as the principles of engineering, and cannot be reduced to an equation or formula but they exist nevertheless. And a project leader's probability of success with these principles far exceeds the probability of success without them. Jim Lewis - author of three very successful project management books with McGraw-Hill - has his finger on the pulse in this subject area. Leadership is the one area that Jim Lewis felt was really not being addressed in the project management field. Project Leadership will fill that gap.