Project Management and Project Leadership

Whatever your specialist skills, I’d recommend spending a little time researching on-line search terms…I’ve found it very enlightening.  The numbers below are relative, based on Yahoo searches per month:

The top search terms are currently “myspace” and “google” with 19 and 18 million searches respectively, while the old web perennials “porn” and “free porn” receive only 3 million and 1.4 million.

With 98,018 searches in February, the term “project voyeur” was twice as popular as the term “project” on its own.  Project Voyeur is, inevitably,  a porn site.  But who searches for just the word “project”?  It’s such a vague search term, surely nobody finds what they want.

If you searched for “project management”, you would have created one of 29,235 searches for that term – being about 1/3 less popular than “playlist project”, which is social music tool for creating playlists for web 2.0 sites like MySpace, hi5 and Blogger.

More popular than either of them were the search terms “science project” and “science fair project”.  I think this is a fairly clear indication of the internet demographic.

Coming back on-topic, “project leadership” gets 1.7% of the number of searches of “project management”…but why?  Time for a revolution, I think.

And here’s a new interesting topic I found: “Essence of Decision” – which is a term borrowed from the title of a book on the Cuban missile crisis.  It documents how decisions are influenced by organizational process as well as organizational politics – how decisions in large organizations are rarely rational.  Based on my own experience, I concur.

Philip Greenwood

Tags: Decisions, Project