Client stories, lessons & cautionary tales from 10+ years ago – that we wish we had learned then!

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That time when you stepped in to put out the fires in a project, only to have the head of the project play matches and throw gasoline everywhere (with Mark Herschberg)

When problems arise, it’s important to identify the root cause to effectively come up with a solution. But what if the head of the project likes to add more problems to the mix and then asks why things are going wrong? Mark Herschberg, our sharer for this episode, had this experience, and he shared lots of helpful advice about management, communication, and problem-solving. 

In this episode, Mark Herschberg, a Chief Technology Officer and author shares his story when he was working under “Evil Corp” (a code name for the company).

At that time, he was assigned to a company division that was working on creating a new type of video service/ video marketplace platform where viewers could watch content from movie studios and tv stations under controlled access. With this wonderful idea in mind, Evil Corp put out a press release stating their release date.

The catch is that Evil Corp wasn’t very good at doing projects like this, so they decided to get a vendor to do it for them. But there’s more…The funny thing is the vendor wasn’t optimized for this project, and they wanted to bring in 2 more vendors that had the technology that Evil Corp needed.

By the time Mark was brought into the company, the project was launched. Instead of being a convenient video platform, everything was done manually by phone and email. Plus, there was a game of broken telephone going on between the 3 vendors and the internal team of the company.

As Mark said, everything was on fire, and he was there to put out the fires. By the end of the episode, Mark and Morgan talked about the essence of management, communication, and problem-solving, which could be helpful to you as well!

 

Morgan Friedman

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