What do golf and project management have in common? Frank Ryle’s elevator speech boils down to this: a golfer works to make his or her approach and swing simple, repeatable, and reliable — and the same goes for managing any project.
That’s the premise behind the new book by Frank Ryle, a Princeton resident who happens to be both an avid golfer and a consultant with more than 20 years of international engineering project management experience and an additional 11 years as a teacher of project management.
Ryle, who has served as an international project manager for Arup International and managed construction and operation of the first Cadbury Schweppes factory in Russia, will appear at the Princeton Public Library on Wednesday, April 11, at 7 p.m. to discuss his book, “Keeping Score: Project Management for the Pros.”
A native of Ireland, Ryle learned to golf at age 10. He represented his club, school, and college and played as a professional golfer in the first Russian Open in 1996.
Along the way he fell into the project management role. As he told Fast Company magazine: “Project management was just a thing you did, a job you had, but nobody wrote about it just a little while ago. You weren’t a ‘project manager’ in the 1980s and ’90s, but when something went good or bad, everybody else stepped backwards, and you were the one left. Project managers were the only ones who could talk about the process, not just the product. And, usually, you were the person who had the charm to do it.”
Ryle’s book is published by IIL Publishing and available in paperback, $19.95, and E-book, $9.95, via www.iil.com/keeping-score.
