Where will 32 million dollars, 11 months to spend it, and 106 staffers, many of whom had ivy league degrees, lead you. You guessed it, abject failure. Well, project and company failure that is while for many of us it was the time of our lives. We had everything we could ever want from big-screen TVs and craft beer on the “break floor”, a three-hole putting green, fancy titles, first-class tickets, posh hotels, the best workstations, and phones money could buy at the time. We wanted for nothing, well, nothing except fiscal and project discipline.
The 32 million dollar disaster was like sinking to the bottom of the ocean in a gilded first-class cabin of a turn of the century ocean liner. It was wonderful until it wasn’t, until the bills came due. Not three months later, I found myself sitting in the back “office” of a broken-down trailer at a broken down company in an old mill town on the outskirts of the shinning city I used to work in. We had very little money, the technology stunk, the “cafeteria” was straight out of a 1950s manufacturing plant, it didn’t even have an espresso machine. While there were a few good people at the company, no one was from Havard. We wanted for everything but from this rose fiscal responsibility and project discipline. We had no choice but to be disciplined and execute. Five years later, we turned the company around from the brink of bankruptcy and sold it on the strength of its new, industry-leading technology for several times what our investors had initially targeted.
The bottom line is that being hungry helps. Being hungry forces focus. Every decision must be weighed carefully. No “dead weight” can be carried. No time wasted on secondary priorities or superfluous projects. No tolerance for politics or off-mission efforts.
If your project/ company is underfunded to the point that it cannot succeed, you have a problem that cannot be solved (best to move on). However, if your project is lean but reasonably funded, consider yourself lucky. You have the incentive you need to execute. The question is, what do you do with too much money. The answer, ignore it. That is, create a lean budget necessary to complete the project and stick to it. Create a staffing plan of who is needed when to complete the objective on time, with quality, within an acceptable range of risk. You can always hold the additional funds and resources off to the side as a break glass in case of emergency, but don’t judge yourself by the extra funds, drive your execution based on the budget and plan you have compiled. Sounds nice but no one would actually do this right. I mean no one would leave money on the table even if the project didn’t really need it. Well, no one but those who actually succeed.