Book review: From Lemons to Lemonade

Dean A Shepherd’s new book From Lemons to Lemonadefrom Wharton School Publishing is about making the most of your mistakes.  It discusses how to best learn from failure in the fastest possible way, so you can use those lessons for your next corporate (or personal) challenge.

Projects (and project managers) fail all the time.  In fact, if you haven’t had a big project go belly up then you haven’t had a rounded career as a project manager – yet.  I’m sure it will happen to you sometime, if you’ve been lucky up until now.

The book includes lots of anecdotes from people who have failed in some respect, and my favourite was a story about Mark Magnacca, President of Insight Development Group and the organiser of a corporate teambuilding event that included a firewalk. For various reasons, the normal firewalk ‘protocols’ weren’t met, and Magnacca had to set it up differently to previous events.  The change in circumstances – time of day, different materials available in the locale – meant that the fire was a lot hotter than normal and when he walked on the coals he got burned.  And so did a couple of his clients, before he could pull the plug on the event.  “Basically this business is over,” said Magnacca, in the case study.  He was fortunate to be working with very supportive clients, and in a situation where he could pinpoint exactly what went wrong.  He got a pep talk from the national sales manager of his client and set up a new event for the following week.  “I get out there as scared as I have ever been,” continues the case study, “and I walked across this 10-foot bed of hot coals and it did not burn.”  The event went off without a hitch, and since then Magnacca’s company has had 10,000 people successfully do firewalks.

Shepherd writes:

Projects differ in how important they are to us.  Projects that better satisfy our needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness are more important.  The more important a project is, the greater the emotional reaction when it fails.  This emotional reaction is painful, it takes time to recover, and the reaction obstructs learning.  We can act in ways to lessen the pain, shorten the recovery period, and learn more from the failure to personally grow from the experience.

He sets out two strategies.  First, approaching the failure logically and working out what went wrong – focusing on the ‘learning’ part.  Second, forget about the project failure and concentrate on other things.  In fact, Shepherd recommends the ‘oscillation’ strategy: swinging between the two so that you recognise the emotions caused by failure but also spend some time working on the issues that caused it.  It’s neither a head-in-the-sand or over-analytical approach.

The book is full of good stories and good advice, but I was expecting the tone to be a lot lighter and a lot more fun, given the title.  From Lemons to Lemonade: Squeeze Every Last Drop of Success Out of Your Mistakes sounds like a really fun, upbeat read.  Instead, it is verging on the academic, with plenty of charts and mini-studies where you can work out where you fall on the ‘isolation subscale’ or the ‘mindfulness subscale’.  I suppose I should have expected nothing less from Wharton, which is renowned as a leader in the field of theory and practice of business and management.  Even so, I felt disappointed that it was like reading a text book in parts.

I also wasn’t sure when would be the best time to read a book like this.  When I have failed?  I’d be an emotional wreck and not likely to take in any of the advice.  When I was on the verge of failure?  Chances are I would still be in head-in-the-sand mode and not willing to accept that the failure was coming.  So that leaves reading it far in advance and then hoping that when the time comes some part of the book sticks.  Here’s hoping my memory serves me when the time comes…

If you liked this, you might enjoy:

1. Book review: Rescue the Problem Project By the time I was half way through the introduction I liked Todd Williams. I liked his way of thinking, his faith in project management...
2. Book review: Why new systems fail It’s an odd experience, reading a book about project management that uses none of the language of project management or business analysis.  Phil Simon’s book,...
3. Book review: PMP: Project Management Professional Exam Review Guide PMP Project Management Professional Exam Review Guide has a practical, descriptive title – and it’s a practical, descriptive book.  Kim Heldman and Vanina Mangano have...