Checkered Flag Projects

Business project plan consultants Randolph and Posner present ten chapters that offer rules for successful project management. Rules addressing project organization and managing the product team are respectively represented by the acronyms GOCART-S and DRIVER, which the authors suggest need to be put together to win the "checkered flag" of the business race. Most of the rules are standard to management literature, including setting goals and objectives, reinforcing people's energy, establishing communication, encouraging creativity, and the like. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

W. ALAN RANDOLPH is Professor of Management in the Robert G. Merrick School of Business, University of Baltimore, in Baltimore, Maryland, and senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies in Escondido, California.

He consults and leads workshops on a wide range of topics, including global business leadership, teamwork, project management, performance management, and empowerment issues, for such companies as Analog Devices, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Robbins-Gioia, Cargill, and the St. Paul Companies.

His articles on empowerment and project leadership have been published in the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Organizational Dynamics, and many other leading business journals. With Ken Blanchard and John P. Carlos, he is co-author of Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute, a BusinessWeek best seller that has been translated into 13 foreign languages and recently updated and re-released. Randolph is also co-author of The 3 Keys to Empowerment: Release the Power within People for Astonishing Results.

BARRY Z. POSNER is Professor of Leadership and Dean at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University, in Santa Clara, California.

A frequent conference speaker and workshop facilitator, he has worked with organizations including Merck, Hewlett-Packard, L.L. Bean, Alcoa of Australia, TRW, Mervyn's, Lockheed Martin, Levi Strauss, Kaiser Permanente Health Care, Motorola, the U.S. Postal Service, the Conference Board of Canada, Applied Materials, Network Appliance, and Accenture.

With Jim Kouzes, he is author of The Leadership Challenge: How to Keep Getting Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations. With over one million copies in print, this book has been the Featured Selection of several book clubs, was named book of the year by the American Council of Health Care Executives, received the Critic's Choice Award from the nation's book review editors, and has been translated into over 15 foreign languages.