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Soviet Union, circa 1932: Centrally planned budgets, prediction and (apparent) conformance to plan, top-down command-and-control, One-Year Plans (and longer), performance quotas with punishments and rewards, quality slogans, conformers rising to the top, ... thank goodness the management practices of Cold-War-era Soviet and Chinese planned economies are over! Oh, wait... isn\'t that what is taught in many “modern” financial and project-management curriculums and applied in large-scale product development — the domain where I do most of my work? Let\'s take a stroll down memory lane and delight in the stories, practices, and extraordinary dysfunctions in Soviet-style planning, and their continuing use in management. And, Comrades, looking towards Our Glorious Post-Hegemonic Future, we\'ll explore alternatives and adoption-stories in large-scale enterprise and product management based on lean thinking, agile principles, and Large-Scale Scrum — and consider if the “Soviet” mentality can ever die in management.
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