Introduction Warp Speed in a Nutshell

Are you working at warp speed—too busy to plan, too rushed to communicate in anything more than e-mail snippets, and too overloaded to read all the e-mail you get? Do overlooked details lead to broken commitments and project problems?

Imagine what your life would be like if you could eliminate the overload; alleviate the struggle to meet “unrealistic” deadlines; reduce the constant firefighting, poor planning, and ineffective communication; and slash the endless time wasted in meetings trying to sort it all out.

It could happen! If only you could get everyone on your team fired up about your project, committed to its success, and pointed in the same direction. But how?

You’re about to meet five people who are asking this same question. They need to find an answer—fast. They have overpromised and underdelivered on their projects. Their customers are unhappy, and their time is about to run out. They feel discouraged. At times it seems the harder they try, the worse things get. If they can’t turn things around in six months, their next project will be finding work!2

Can anything really make a difference? They are skeptical. That is until they see for themselves, through a startling experiment, that they have been solving the wrong problem. Perhaps you have too?

Reading Working at Warp Speed could change the way you work forever. It’s distilled twelve years of project breakthroughs in leading high-tech companies, top universities, and government institutions into four hands-on rules that can deliver immediate results. These four rules are like the angel in Michelangelo’s block of marble—to find them we have only to chip away everything unnecessary. The chipping away takes some time and effort, but the results are well worth it. You will find that they dispel the myth that project management must be boring and highly technical. What’s more, they show how anyone can take advantage of this extraordinary system to lighten the workload and ignite the passion of any team.