Supply-chain management and operations research are systematic disciplines for managing operational, industrial work. Project management is a systematic discipline for managing any kind of work that produces a unique outcome. The discipline of managing operational, post-industrial work, a.k.a. service delivery, is not yet systematized.

Supply-chain management doesn’t deal with “risk” per se: uncertainties are considered variances in process inputs. A sub-activity of project management is risk management. I believe risk management is already practiced in operational management, but in an informal way. I’m going to speak as if project and operational risk management are interchangable:

According to every textbook, risk management is about responding to both threats (negative risks) and opportunities (positive risks). The “management” usually boils down to planning, because once the risk occurs it’s just part of project/operational management to coordinate a response. The most powerful response plan is to change the structure of the project/operations to avoid threats and enhance opportunities.

In practice, opportunity exploitation is left to business leaders rather than managed systematically. On a broad scale, corporations are inherently greedy; leadership charters projects and creates business processes to maximize profit. But internally, on a fine scale, business processes and project plans are systematically developed to minimize loss. Organizations implement the loss aversion fallacy that individual people have.

I recently came across this old article by Peter Drucker (the 20th century’s greatest management guru) about managing yourself and career planning in the contemporary world. Some key quotes:

• “Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.”
• “Many brilliant people [believe] that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.”
• “One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”
• “Very few of the people who believed that doing one’s own thing would lead to contribution, self-fulfilment, and success achieved any of the three.”
• “There is another reason to develop a second major interest, and to develop it early. No one can expect to live very long without experiencing a serious setback in his or her life or work… In a society in which success has become so terribly important, having options will become increasingly vital… For a great many people, there is at best an absence of failure. Wherever there is success, there has to be failure. And then it is vitally important for the individual, and equally for the individual’s family, to have an area in which he or she can contribute, make a difference, and be somebody.”

This blog represents – but, in itself, isn’t – my second major interest: reading, thinking and writing about ideas that are too multidisciplinary, abstract and esoteric to make a job out of. I don’t have measurable success in this interest, but I think I have an absence of failure.