03.25.07
On being the best
I just saw a master seasoner seasoning mackerel on TV. It is impressive that he can grab 20g of salt each time with his bare hands. He demonstrated by grabbing salt and scattering it onto 3 electronic weighing scales. On the first attempt, he was off by 2g on one of the scale. In the second attempt, he managed to “weigh” 20g consistently on the 3 scales. In practice, he is able to salt the mackerel with such consistency 10 at a time in 2 seconds flat. That is what we call a true master.
It reminds me of what I set out to be. I have to strive on being the best in the line I am in. Being the best currently means to be able to make impossible projects finish in record cost and time covering the most scope and attaining the highest quality. Only when I am able to do that consistently for all projects would I be able to call myself a true master.
Unlike operational work, project work is not repetitive and hence, to be able to see patterns across projects is challenging. To be able to master this, I need to work on impossible projects. To work on impossible projects, I first need to show to people that I can do the simple projects well. In addition, I need to be doing projects across multiple domains to be able to comprehend different types of projects and understanding the patterns. So far in my career, I have a fair bit of switches from research to technical to people management, from pharmaceutical to products to projects and from supply chain to regulatory to financial accounting.
Some of the hard projects I have seen as one or more of the following characteristics:
- Same data coming from different sources
- Processes driven by legacy and regulation that nobody really know absolutely about
- Organization structure mismatches
- Strong resistance from key business stakeholders