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Waiter! There’s A Rhinoceros Head On The Table
If you’ve dated, you know what I’m talking about.
You’re in the middle of the first date and at some point in the evening, a palatable tension grows and apprehension creeps in. The Great Unanswered Question arises.
And though you both pretend you don’t feel it, it soon becomes the metaphorical rhinoceros head in the middle of table — the huge hulking ugly thing you desperately try to ignore all evening. You lean far over to one side to talk around it, peer over its horns at each other, etc. — but you never acknowledge it.
But like the brat who points out that the emperor is actually naked, one of visual mapping’s rising stars has dared to blog about the rhino head in the middle of the mindmapping table. Click the link to read Kyle McFarlin’s funny and blistering post about ”The Elephant in MindMapping’s Parlor.”
Different metaphor. Same meaning.
In particular, McFarlin nails the rhino head by directly pointing it out with this line:
> “… no one can find their MindMaps.”
I agree. And unfortunately, Mindjet fosters the illusion by really pushing their marketing message of ‘MindManager is a great project manager.’ And it is, if you’ve only got a project or two to manage. If you have a hundred maps (or more) like many of us do, that claim falls apart so fast you’ll get hit by the shrapnel.
Yet, when you talk to the stakeholders in Fortune 500 companies who run MindManager with ResultsManager, universally they are almost scathing in their indictment that MindManager would not be an effective tool if they weren’t using it in conjunction with ResultsManager.
MindManager needs ResultsManager to be a fully functional tool for managing projects. I’ve previously blogged about my challenges with Mindjet’s ‘project manager’ claims. Read it here.
What McFarlin has pointed out reminds me of Jerry Maguire’s “The Things We Think, But Do Not Say” mission statement. It took balls to say it and he may weather some storms because he dared say it, but in the end, the field and he will be better for it.
By Walter |
Topics: From The Trenches, Pro Analysis |