Tony Gruebl Jeff Welch - The Red Pill Executive

The Red Pill Executive

Simple is hard. Complexity is easy. The Red Pill Executive takes a complicated topic and turns it into a simple and easy read thats so deep it merits reading again and again. The authors set the bar high and then deliver practical steps coming from their years of experience in the field.

They also fearlessly confront culture. In a previous position, I experienced the power of culture while on a team tasked with making a radical shift toward more accountability. Two years in, we had a cultural snap-back where morale and loyalty fell apart to the point that we had a downturn in customer satisfaction. The books case study on this topic felt like someone was a fly on the wall in my office back then. I wish I had read that chapter years ago.

These guys must have watched a movie of the last 10 years of my professional life!

Anyone working with projects should have a copy of The Red Pill Executive on their office shelf. Youll read about creating successful PM teams, for sure, but youll also get insights on safely navigating company culture, and you might even learn how to be more effective yourself.

~ Steve Jenkins , Global Program Management Leader, Large Aerospace Company

I love the way that The Red Pill Executive articulates what the seasoned professional intuitively knows about how to navigate culture and the efficacy that carries with it. It provides a framework and gives clarity to something that is felt at a gut level and learned through experience. Their explanation also gave me tools that will help me train my teams to understand culture in a way that makes sense in the day-to-day operations of projects.

a marvelous mix of research, experience and storytelling.

The authors use of movies makes it a marvelous mix of research, experience, and storytelling. Weaving the concepts through action movies is a brilliant way to illustrate the paradigm shift in thinking that takes place when we look at culture as a core component of managing change. It also made the read enjoyable as well as practical.

I wish I could say it was a quick read, but I stopped to mark up my copy with notes so frequently that it took me a while to get through it. I sat down to read and ended up captured by the ideas. Ill return to those notes many, many times. Bottom line, this book made me want to work with the guys at Think!

~ Kate Krupey , Technology Executive Advisor, former CIO of KatzAbosch, P.A.

THE

RED PILL

EXECUTIVE

TRANSFORM OPERATIONS AND UNLOCK
THE POTENTIAL OF CORPORATE CULTURE

NEW YORK

LONDONNASHVILLEMELBOURNEVANCOUVER

The Red Pill Executive

Transform Operations and Unlock the Potential of Corporate Culture

2021 Tony Gruebl, Jeff Welch, and Bryan Wolbert

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in New York, New York, by Morgan James Publishing. Morgan James is a trademark of Morgan James, LLC. www.MorganJamesPublishing.com

ISBN 9781642799491 paperback

ISBN 9781642799507 eBook

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956188

Cover Design by:

Christopher Kirk

www.GFSstudio.com

Interior Design by:

Chris Treccani

www.3dogcreative.net

Morgan James is a proud partner of Habitat for Humanity Peninsula and Greater Williamsburg. Partners in building since 2006.

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When I first learned about Think Systems, I was CTO during a merger that had all the earmarks of a first-class disaster. We were two years in. The situation was becoming more and more complex, and our deadline was only three months away.

Im a transformational agilest, and I had tried to address the project using agile methods. I had a great team with stellar business analysts, developers, scrum masters, user experience architects, and more. However, this project had gaps, and throwing more developers or business analysts at it would only be adding resources to areas that werent really the problem.

Just as an example, say I had people who could write great user stories, but those great writers had no concept of how to tailor those stories to highlight our competitive advantage. Those talented writers were actually blockers because they didnt deliver the value we needed. By realizing the problem and opening up those blocks, the rest of the team could finally make progress.

I needed someone to find the blocks in the merger and help us open them up.

Thats when I called in Think. They gave us a Strategic Project Manager and two full-time PMs as well as several others. Basically, they landed on us like the Marines storming a beach. What happened after that blew me away. We finished the merger before the three-month deadline and did it with elegance.

Seeing how they handled that dire situation, I learned how to modify my own approach to my teams. I placed less weight on certifications and more weight on the conduct of the individual. PMs who wanted to follow formulas simply for the sake of following formulas didnt cut it anymore. Now I was looking for team members who understood what it meant to be in alignment with the company vision and mission. I wanted someone who knew the meaning of Business Value Potential and who had the courage speak out when they saw a block looming ahead.

I wanted someone who had more than simple technical know-how. I wanted someone who understood culture, who had a sense of what makes the key players tick, and who had some personal investment in the outcome. I wanted someone who could build a strategy based on solid principles, but with the flexibility to match the specific situation so we could make real progress that mattered.

Think changed my entire perspective on what effective project management entailed. However, at the same time I also realized that the amount of manpower and time they had invested in our company meant their process was not scalable. Theyd have to train several teams filled with capable, savvy operators like Tony, Bryan, and others who were willing to work hard and long to get the job done.

Over the years since then, Ive seen these brilliant professionals go through a maturing process. They actually cracked the code. Not only have they scaled their process, but theyve broken the steps down into a readable, informative, and entertaining (albeit somewhat in-your-face) book.

Fasten your seatbelt. Things are about to get real when you dig into this stuff. These guys dont mince words, and they dont take prisoners. Youre gonna love em.

John Camp

Technology Executive Advisor, former CTO of Bloomberg BNA, Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, Wolters Kluwer Health Division, and Sheshunoff Information Services, Thomson Financial Media Group

Thank you to those who encourage us to question everything to get better at what we do! Without Lana McAra, our amazingly creative and talented collaborator and Ghost Writer, this book would otherwise be dry and poorly written in the voice of three guys in a Baltimore bar, telling stories about how our profession is like the movie Pulp Fiction. Lana is the best-selling, award-winning author of more than 20 titles and shes a sought-after speaker. She made this book interesting and fun to write and generally tolerated our shenanigans.