This book is a very useful book for both scholars and PM practitioners. It is a natural follow on from Kaye's earlier book (Remington and Pollack, 2007) and I felt that it was a better written book as well. This book is more polished and confident and has some terrific references that readers who enjoy being prompted by citations to new interesting cutting edge work, will appreciate. The earlier book is well work obtaining with this one as a compendium.
As with my review of her earlier book on complexity I found myself engrossed and making many marks, notations and reminders to follow up on interesting threads. This, for me, is always a good sign that a book is worth keeping and is frequently referring to. This is another book that I asked our library to stock at least six copies because it serves not only the Masters level programs but is also good for doctoral candidates and scholars who regularly need access to this material. The book is structured in three sections with 14 chapters.
Section one, what good leadership does when projects are complex, comprises nine chapters. Chapter 1 is about comprehending complexity. This chapter provides a neat summary of concepts raised in her earlier book and in a fairly short chapter conveys much of the baseline ideas needed to follow the rest of the book. As with all the chapters, she draws upon an impressive set of citations that in themselves are useful for anyone doing a literature review of PM complexity. Chapter 2 is about the importance of communication. This longer chapter contains the usual suspects in communication in PM that can be found elsewhere but it does show how this is more critical in complex projects and she provides in this, as with many other chapters, a table of questions to assist (in this case) communications planning. These tables that appear quite frequently in her book chapters provide useful checklists and she summarises this (and other chapters) well which is handy when returning to the book after reading it for references purposes. Chapter 3 is about cultivating effective teams from the project team to project boards. A number of other PM focussed books I have read lately purport to talk about teams in a PM context but usually regurgitate old and readily known basics of managing and energising teams. I think that Remington has done a reasonable job here of making this well tuned to PM and so those with basic knowledge can get more out of the PM specifics from this chapter. Chapter 4 is entitled “Employ Portfolio‐program Thinking”. This brings in her knowledge of how projects fit into a larger scheme of things and that is useful because many inexperienced project managers see only their part, their project, and they often can use systems thinking but find it hard to gain that wider perspective unless they are aware of some basics of program and portfolio management concepts. This chapter provides a useful overview to frame projects. Chapter 5, challenge through innovation, draws on her architectural skills in design and thinking about creative ways to solve problems and she also introduces aspects of “wicked problems” and so it is a pragmatic and practical way to look at innovation. She raises useful pointers to convergent and divergent thinking. With this, as with other chapters, she draws upon quotes from her research participants “lived experience” and this adds a measure of credibility and interest to her messages. Chapter 6 is entitled “Think About Thinking”. When it comes to dealing with truly complex projects, and her book cites quotes from senior managers who discuss some amazingly complex and complicated projects, she manages to stress the importance of the human mind and its capacity for non‐linear thinking. She discusses emotion, gut‐feeling and assets that experience can surface for reflective practitioners. This chapter would make a lot of sense to project managers moving from being competent to proficient (Cicmil, 2003; Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 2005; Walker et al., 2008, p. 23). Chapter 7 considers culture and introduces the area to those not familiar with the importance of culture at the organisational and international level and it also touches on intergenerational culture. This chapter is useful but more of a primer than anything else. It relies on Hofstede (1980) and he has more recently updated his ideas (Hofstede et al., 2010) and acknowledges shortcomings in his early work. Remington could have treated this topic in more depth, perhaps using the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) study (House et al., 2004; Chhokar et al., 2008) as it is more extensive and current but readers can get a reasonable grasp of the importance of culture to complexity in projects. Chapter 8 is about political skill and coping with complexity in projects. This is a vital addition to the understanding of all projects, especially complex ones. Again she has some excellent and useful quotes from her research in this and some useful tables as checklists. Chapter 9 is about piloting through crises and it provides useful quotes that reveal the actuality of PM as opposed to the myths of certainty. This is a nice practical chapter that will resonate with many practitioners.
Section two of the book moves to discuss what good leadership needs when projects are complex. Chapter 10 has a focus on governance. There has been a welcomed recent shift in emphasis from early PM writing about governance that has been a transfer from corporate governance as applied in projects to one that has more roundly adapted to the differences in project governance as opposed to corporate governance. Interested readers may refer to for example work by Müller (2009, 2011) and Klakegg et al. (2009, 2010). This chapter provides useful complementary reading to those and other recent project governance oriented materials. Closely aligned to this is Chapter 11 which is entitled “Authority Over Key Roles”. This is a short chapter but highly relevant and provides stimulating reading. The essential role capability table 11.1 is very useful to anyone designing and developing a team on a complex project. I certainly saw value in it and striking parallels to recent work that I have done on profiling excellence in project alliance managers (Walker and Lloyd‐Walker, 2011). Remington's research interviews were with a completely different set of participants to mine but both were working on complex projects and the quotes and analysis are highly complementary. Table 11.1 would be very valuable to practitioners in particular. The last chapter in Section two, Chapter 12, is called “Partners for Peace” and is a brief but useful prompt about the importance of relationship building in PM.
Section three is quite short, two chapters on how good leadership behaves when projects are complex. Chapter 13 has a quirky title “As Humble Iconoclasts”. This resonates with a discussion on emotional intelligence but extends the concept to elements of a complex project leader being good at taking on board the perceptions of others and being both humble and brave enough to challenge the status quo and to be also open about not understanding complex situations fully enough to anticipate all important consequences. Humble iconoclasts according to Remington are honest enough to state their limitations and big enough to seek advice and views from many quarters. This chapter is a great antidote to practice of spin doctoring and strategic lying. The last chapter, Chapter 14, is entitled “With Charisma, Resilience, Determination and Courage”. This is a good way to end this book. It discusses many aspects of authentic leadership. It is short and, like many other chapters, could have been longer. However, this is still a hefty book with enough substance and literature references to send its readers scurrying off to chase up the many literary sources and to sit back and reflect upon the many useful quotations from her research that she cites. Importantly, readers would most likely learn more when returning to this book many times as any good reference book should do.
I spent about two months reading this book (along with many other things but over my summer holiday as well). I am sure that I will cite this book extensively and the papers and books that it has led me to. I think that other readers will value it as well.
