Before we get to the projects, let me tell you a story about work.

Work has always been considered an essential part of being human: a means of providing for food, clothes, and shelter. In the wake of the social turmoil and rising unemployment which led to the February Revolution of 1848 in France, the French socialist leader Louis Blanc argued that human beings have “the right to work”, or engage in productive employment, and may not be prevented from doing so.

But since the industrial revolution, workers have been progressively reduced to numbers, headcount, assets, fixed costs; organizations have been driven primarily by targets and control systems.

Significant innovations in management have mostly focused on doing the work faster and more cheaply.

Most management theories revolved around the organization’s purpose to increase shareholder value. Productivity, efficiency gains, and short-termism would take place of pride for decades, mostly at the expense of employees—the human and social side of organizations.

Many organizations lost sight of this:

“The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things”

-Peter Drucker

The impact of globalization and technological advancements, with thousands of companies collapsing and millions of jobs vanishing in western economies, has caused an enormous loss of confidence in capitalism and western leaders. And according to Silicon Valley futurists, over the next 10 years, societies will experience more change than in the past two and a half centuries.

More change, at a greater speed than ever!

Despite this daunting outlook, let me put forward one idea that can inspire us to remain positive and prompt us to action.

There is one model of productive collaboration, a method of work to generate value, that has remained constant over centuries, irrespective of organizational fashions.

This universal method of working and organizing work is the project.

Project-based work has been the engine that turned ideas into reality and generated the major accomplishments in our civilization.

I’ll show you how.