• Nobody should ever have to solve a problem twice.

• Boredom and drudgery are evil.

• Freedom is good.

• Attitude is no substitute for competence.

These five attitudes provide excellent guidance for project managers, and indeed for all managers. But how does one apply them in the real world?

First, it's important to understand what a project is. The standard management definition refers to a temporary effort to create something new. A process, by contrast, is work that is repeatable and well understood. For each project to be truly new, then, completed projects need to be studied thoroughly, so that those aspects that are routine or repeatable can be turned into processes.

For engineers and scientists, the fascinating problems exist where processes have yet to be defined. Take George Lake, a leading astrophysicist who last year became chief information officer of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Wash. Explaining his move, Lake said, "Biology has some of the hardest problems out there." So the more one reserves the word "project" for work that truly results in never-before-attained outcomes, the greater the opportunity for fascination, and the greater the possibility of attracting good minds. In a mature organization, the term "fascinating project" should be redundant.

Never solve a problem twice
The second hacker attitude complements the first nicely because it ensures that only unsolved problems remain. Let me offer a trivial example, which I call "A Physicist's Approach to Wardrobe Processing."

When I began my transition from working scientist to science administrator, I had to wear a jacket and tie every day for the first time in my life. (One reason I had gone into science in the first place was because scientists can wear what they want.) After a few days of frittering away early-morning minutes deciding which tie went with which shirt, jacket, and pants, I said to myself, "This is nuts." Thus was born the Clothes Matrix. Together with my wife--one should recognize one's core competencies and outsource when necessary--I determined all the appealing sartorial combinations and printed them in a matrix.

Getting dressed then amounted to simply choosing the shirt or tie I felt like wearing, and letting the matrix determine the rest. (The evolved matrix is now computer-generated in a searchable format.) Silly? Maybe. Efficient? Definitely. A more sophisticated embodiment of attitude 2 is mass production--automating routine tasks frees people to tackle new problems.

At the close of every project, the manager needs to ask, What did we learn? And how can we do better? The importance of fully documenting the results of each project becomes obvious. A good hacker not only debugs code but also annotates it, so that others unfamiliar with the code may understand and use it. Likewise, a project manager should identify whatever good and bad techniques arise, so that the organization can gain from that experience. Sadly, such activities are often considered peripheral to the project by upper management.

Boredom is evil
Some managers have great difficulty with the third hacker attitude, insisting that a certain amount of boredom and drudgery in work is unavoidable. Some organizations essentially repeat the same work over the course of many years. While the term "project" may be used to describe what they do, in reality the employees are solving essentially the same problem many times, finding little challenge and consuming much effort. The problem is exacerbated when such organizations hire highly educated people, presumably to solve the difficult problems that a real project would entail.

While boredom and drudgery exist, though, a good manager tries to reduce their occurrence, appreciates those who must contend with boring work, and looks for ways to minimize dull operations through automation. (To be sure, tedious paperwork is the name of the game in project management; nobody seems to have a solution for that.)

Freedom is good
The fourth attitude is quite powerful. Employees who are free to think and to act will share their ideas and point out mistakes as they occur; that in turn improves a company's bottom line. After all, if you're not willing to give workers freedom, why hire bright people in the first place? Fundamental to freedom is valid (in the sense of modeling reality) information, which in turn requires honesty.

One need only scan the newspapers to see how rarely this attitude is embraced. Stories abound of projects that run over budget by millions or billions of dollars, or fall behind schedule by months or years. The Boston Turnpike Authority's Big Dig tunnel project is a prime example. Its total cost ballooned from an estimated US $2.3 billion in 1984 to, at last count, $18 billion, a nearly eightfold increase. A federal task force investigating the project found that project managers had intentionally covered up problems, and the head of the project resigned.

So ask yourself: does your organization maintain an environment that gives workers freedom and encourages communication, or does it reward silence, while hoping for excellence?

Competence trumps attitude
After the Big Dig scandal broke, the governor of Massachusetts asked the Turnpike Authority chairman to resign, but then noted that the chairman had withheld information "in his zeal to do the job and complete this project." The fifth attitude explains that "zeal" or any other emotion does not excuse dishonesty and incompetence. Indeed, the other four hacker attitudes mean nothing without the fifth. Freedom gives excellence its opportunity, but talent and hard work produce a successful result.

Taken together, the last two attitudes make management incompetence impossible, I would argue. Unless an organization has hired only incompetents, the information needed to identify errors and fix them will eventually surface. Freedom means the messenger isn't shot, and a reverence for competence means needed corrections will be made. The cycle feeds on itself toward a steady state where mistakes exist for a vanishingly small time.

Should we replace professional management ethics codes with the five hacker attitudes? The attitudes communicate their intentions well because of their simplicity, and their simplicity is their power. I suggest starting with the last one and working backward. As a reward for your competence, support of freedom, reduction of others' drudgery, and appreciation that people should not waste their time and brainpower, you get to manage attacks on fascinating problems. Improvements in the management culture will occur slowly, of course. The goal, though, should be to force a modification in the hacker dictionary: "Manager: One who believes and practices the five hacker attitudes in executing fascinating projects (see also hacker)."