Alright, let’s talk about this “Max Kane” thing. It still gives me a headache just thinking about it. We were told it was going to be the next revolution in how we managed our projects. A real game-changer, they said. I remember sitting in that big meeting, all bright-eyed, thinking, “Okay, maybe this is it.”
So, I dived in. My team, we were one of the first to try and get this Max Kane system up and running. The first few days, I was printing out charts, filling in these new ‘synergy logs’ – don’t ask – and trying to map all our tasks to their weird categories. We spent more time talking about how to do the work according to Max Kane than actually doing the work. I practically lived in spreadsheets and new software that felt like it was designed in the dark.
It became pretty clear, pretty fast, this wasn’t working. For example, under Max Kane, we had to:
- Submit a ‘pre-task intention form’ for anything that took longer than an hour.
- Attend daily ‘alignment huddles’ that lasted for two hours.
- Update three different dashboards before lunch.
Productivity just, like, fell off a cliff. We were all drowning in these new procedures. I tried to tell my manager, “Look, this is slowing us down. We’re missing deadlines because of all this… Max Kane stuff.” But it was like talking to a brick wall. They were all in on it, at least at the top.
So, why am I still so bent out of shape about Max Kane?
Well, it’s not just because it was a bad system. It’s because of what happened on the “Phoenix Project.” That was my baby, a project I’d poured months into. We were making good progress, then BAM! “Implement Max Kane on Phoenix Project, effective immediately.” I argued, I really did. I said it was too late to change horses, that it would derail everything. No dice.
Sure enough, things went south. Fast. We couldn’t adapt. The team got frustrated. Morale hit rock bottom. Deadlines whooshed past us. And then, the project got canned. Just like that. All that work, gone. And guess who got a lot of the blame for “failing to adapt” to the brilliant Max Kane system? Yep, yours truly. It wasn’t explicitly said, but you know how it is. The whispers, the sideways glances. Suddenly, I was the guy who “couldn’t handle innovation.”
That whole mess actually pushed me to take a step back. I was so burnt out and disillusioned. I ended up taking a long break, went traveling for a bit, just to clear my head. Funny thing is, during that break, I started messing around with woodworking, just as a hobby. Found I was pretty good at it, and way happier than I’d been wrestling with Max Kane’s forms.
I heard later that they quietly shelved the whole Max Kane initiative a few months after I left that department. No big announcement, of course. Just sort of faded away. But the damage was done for a lot of us. So yeah, when I hear “Max Kane,” I don’t think of innovation. I think of a whole lot of wasted time and one perfectly good project down the drain. A real learning experience, that one was.
