Manifesto for Human Leadership by Marcus Raitner
I've known Marcus Raitner for several years. Personally I met him at several PM-Camps or visited him in Munich for a delicious dinner. I liked his German blog series 'Projektplanung 101' not only because of the beautiful Merlin Project screenshots. I appreciate Marcus as project manager, agile coach and from his stories as enthusiastic father.
Last year he (not only) surprised me with the Manifesto for Human Leadership. At first I was not a great friend of this work. I have to admit that the term Manifesto has triggered a certain "me-too" thought in me, i.e. that Marcus wants to get the reader into the right mood with the key word Manifesto and to be considered an extension of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
Whereby our values are very much the same:
- Unleashing human potential over employing human resources.
- Diversity and dissent over conformity and consensus.
- Purpose and trust over command and control.
- Contributions to networks over position in hierarchies.
- Growing leaders over leading followers.
- Courageously exploring the new over efficiently exploiting the old.
Nevertheless, I have found no real reference to Marcus Raitner's statements. Because I have been practicing many of them for years in my company ProjectWizards. As people, we all work at eye level, hierarchies are a thing of the past, and after more than fifteen years of working together, we trust each other very much. But it's also easy for us. We are all highly specialized and smart knowledge workers (a great term from Peter Drucker) in the digital environment. Other companies have a much harder time of it - and this is where Marcus comes in.
And that's why the book is so important. Because my attitude to his statements has also changed fundamentally after I have read the book. Yes, the blog offers many important explanations, but only the book introduced me deeper into Marcus' thoughts. I now understand how his approach came about and the many examples, anecdotes and quotations lead the values into an understandable context. I got the decisive kick from his request "To work! Here Marcus (of whom I didn't even know that he was such a follower of Peter Drucker) motivates me to fight against the culture of fear and to be a courageous role model, although I would have liked to see a little more emotion at this point.
For the final workshop, which I was also allowed to take part in at the PM-Camp Hamburg 2019, I have another concrete suggestion: The 1-10 scale, which goes from bottom to top, is psychologically very difficult in my opinion. Maybe you, dear Marcus, are thinking about building it up from left to right and thus documenting a path or process. This makes a correct self-evaluation easier than to classify oneself up or down.
But that's already my biggest criticism of the book. I am sure that one or two iterations will complete this manifesto. And now I also like the term ;-)
It was also my mistake not to sign this manifesto. I'll make up for that now!
Frank Blome
