Project management: what if it all started with why?
Project management:
What if it all started with why?
Monday, eight o’clock. The restaurant manager has just learned that the terrace must be renovated before the season opens. She has twelve weeks, a tight budget, three suppliers to coordinate and a team that keeps serving guests throughout the works. She opens a spreadsheet, lists the tasks and sets the deadlines. Three weeks later, the schedule has already slipped. Nobody did a bad job. Nobody really knew why the project mattered.
Thousands of professionals live this scene every year, in hospitality as in healthcare, retail or services. It illustrates an idea Simon Sinek made famous, and it applies perfectly to project management.
What Simon Sinek teaches us about projects
In September 2009, at a TEDx event near Seattle, Simon Sinek drew three circles on a flip chart. At the centre, why. Around it, how. On the outside, what. His talk, How great leaders inspire action, now has around 71 million views on the TED website.
His best known example is Apple. Most companies, he argues, communicate from the outside in: here is what we make, here is why it is good, buy it. Apple does the opposite. The brand starts with its belief in challenging the status quo, then explains how it does so, with simple and carefully designed products, and only at the end says what it sells.
“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
Simon Sinek, How great leaders inspire action, TEDxPugetSound, 2009
Why is the first deliverable of any project
Most approaches to project management start with what: Gantt charts, tracking sheets, software. These tools are essential. Yet projects rarely fail because a chart was badly built. They fail because the team does not share the same goal, because priorities shift and nobody understands why, or because difficult decisions are postponed for lack of a clear criterion.
A well stated why changes this. It helps you choose when the budget tightens. It gives colleagues a reason to commit. It helps convince management, a client or a supplier.
Back to our terrace. “Renovate the terrace” is a task. “Give our guests the finest outdoor space in the neighbourhood from the first sunny day” is a reason. The first fills a calendar. The second brings a team together.
You already manage projects, you just don’t call it that
Many professionals have never held the title of project manager, yet they play the role every week. The executive housekeeper renovating twenty rooms without closing the floor. The HR manager preparing the company’s annual seminar. The front office manager rolling out a new booking system in high season. The executive assistant coordinating an office move.
They all juggle budgets, deadlines, suppliers and people. Often with real talent, almost always by instinct, and sometimes at the cost of long evenings. What they rarely lack is commitment. What they often lack is a method that turns instinct into a structured approach they can repeat.
skill that keeps gaining value
The need goes well beyond individual cases. According to the Talent Gap report published by the Project Management Institute in 2021, the global economy will need around 25 million new project management professionals by 2030.
For employers, that is a recruitment challenge. For employees, it is an opportunity. Project management is one of the few skills that travels from one sector to another, from hospitality to healthcare, from luxury retail to industry. This is upskilling in its most practical sense: adding a skill the market is looking for before you need it, not after.
Hospitality, a natural school for project management
In a hotel, every event is a project with a date that cannot move. The wedding is on Saturday, the conference opens on Monday, the season starts on 1 June. You deliver on time, with a team from very different trades, for a guest who judges the result in seconds. Many theoretical approaches lack this culture of real deadlines and human experience.
That is the spirit behind the Project Management certificate at École Hôtelière Genève. Over five weeks, fully online, participants work through every phase of a project, from drafting the specifications to evaluating results. They learn to analyse needs, identify resources and risks, and choose the right methods and tools.
The programme puts real weight on what spreadsheets cannot solve: communication, leadership and problem solving. These are the skills that bring a team together around a shared goal and help you make sound decisions when the original plan no longer holds.
The online format means you keep working while you study and can apply what you learn the following week. The next session starts on 4 January 2027.
For employers: train the people already carrying your projects
For management or HR, the question is not always how to recruit new project managers. More often it is how to give a shared method to the people who already carry projects every day. Enrolling two or three colleagues from the same team in one session creates a common language, and projects that move at the same pace.
“We meet many committed professionals who carry important projects without a method to structure them. Giving them that method lets them see through what matters to them, without wearing themselves out along the way.”
Duncan Robertson, Deputy Director and Director of Sales and Marketing, École Hôtelière Genève
Start with why
Simon Sinek talks about leaders who inspire. Project management works the same way: tools help you move forward, the why makes you want to arrive. Both can be learned. Think of the project you are carrying right now. If you had to explain its purpose in one sentence, what would that sentence be?
Discover the Project Management certificate at École Hôtelière Genève, starting on 4 January 2027, and download the programme brochure.
