Working Through a Truly Difficult Assignment—Killing a $100 Million Project of a Well-Liked Senior Peer—and Navigating the Organizational Politics

Fran Grigsby is truly talented.  She has held important management positions in a number of companies and now runs her own consulting firm.  Some years ago, she moved from DEC to “Commuco,” and soon found herself faced with a really tricky task in an organization with a tough culture.  She was asked to head a project that most observers considered doomed, but it had been started by a respected senior manager who was still around and invested in it, and she had to figure out how to proceed.  Here she recounts her experience, and what she learned about surviving organizational politics. Some of what she says may make you uncomfortable, but she managed to survive and do well, and it is worth learning from her.  You might decide, as she did, that you don’t want to play in such an arena, but this will help you figure out how to understand and use politics if you want to.

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