It Is a Filing System
Reimagining Project Management for a New Era
SERIES ARTICLE
By Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez
Madrid, Spain
Everyone quotes the line about culture eating strategy for breakfast.
Everyone nods. Nothing changes.
The phrase has lasted decades because it is unfalsifiable and free. It tells you culture matters. It does not tell you what culture is. So anyone can agree with it. At any level. At no cost.
Let me propose something narrower.
In projects, culture is not a mood. It is certainly not the quality of the coffee.
It is the answer to one mechanical question.
Can true information about a project reach the person with authority faster than the project can fail?
Every organisation has an answer. It can be traced.
Trace it, and culture stops being an atmosphere. It becomes plumbing, with identifiable joints where the contents get lost.
A Tuesday in March
Let me walk one piece of bad news through a company.
This is from a European medical devices firm. Spring of 2023. The programme was regulatory, and it finished eleven months late.
On a Tuesday in March, a test engineer found a fault. A data migration routine was dropping records. Nobody had specified the condition that caused it.
She put the rework at seven to nine weeks.
None of what follows is unusual. That’s why I am telling it.
The first gate is whether she says anything.
She had joined fourteen months earlier. The CEO had committed publicly to a regulatory date. In January, a colleague had raised a scheduling concern. He was told, not unkindly, that the team needed solutions, not problems.
She watched that happen.
Researchers have a name for what happens next. The mum effect: the documented reluctance to pass undesirable news upward.[1]
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Editor’s note: This series of articles is by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, the author of Powered by Projects: Leading Your Organization in the Transformation Age (HBR Press, Jan 2026) and The HBR Project Management Handbook (HBR 2021). One of the world’s most popular authors and speakers on the topic of the Project Economy and the Future of Project Management, he is Founder of Projects & Co. , a PMI Fellow & Former Chairman and Thinkers50 Award Winner. Learn more in his author profile at the end of this article.
How to cite this work: Nieto-Rodriguez, A. (2026). Culture Is Not Soft. It Is a Filing System; Reimagining Project Management for a New Era, series article 11, PM World Journal, Vol. XV, Issue XI, November. Available online at https://pmworldjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/pmwj170-Nov2026-Nieto-Rodriguez-Culture-Is-Not-Soft.pdf
About the Author
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez
Madrid, Spain
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, PMI Fellow, is one of the world’s leading experts in Project Management and Strategy Implementation. He is the author of the “Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook ” (HBR 2021) and is the most published author on project management matters in Harvard Business Review. His upcoming book, Powered by Projects: Leading Your Organization in the Transformation Age, will be published by Harvard Business Review Press in early 2026.
Antonio has brought Project Management to the center of executive leadership, positioning it as a critical capability for transformation in the next decade. He is the creator of influential concepts such as the Project Economy®, the Hierarchy of Purpose®, and the Project‑Driven Organization™, which argue that projects have become the operating system of modern organizations—and the language of future careers.
His global impact on management and leadership has been recognized by Thinkers50, where he is the only project management thinker included twice in a row in the ranking of the world’s most influential management thinkers. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Thinkers50 Ideas Into Practice Award and a member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches community.
He was the global Chairman of the Project Management Institute in 2016 and has been recognized as a Fellow of PMI for his contribution to the project management profession. He led the creation of the Brightline Initiative, founded Projects & Co, and co-founded the Strategy Implementation Institute.
His work focuses on advising senior leaders on how to prioritize and implement strategic initiatives and lead transformational change.
Antonio is also the author of “Lead Successful Projects” (Penguin, 2019), “The Project Revolution” (LID, 2019). and “The Focused Organization” (Taylor & Francis, 2014), and has contributed to seven other books. A pioneer and leading authority in teaching and coaching senior executives the art and science of strategy execution and project management. Currently visiting professor at Duke CE, Instituto de Empresa, Solvay, Vlerick, Ecole des Ponts, and Skolkovo.
He is a much-in-demand speaker at events worldwide. Antonio has presented at more than 800 conferences around the world, regularly evaluated as the best speaker. European Business Summit, Strategy Leaders Forum, Gartner Summit, TEDx, and EU Cohesion Policy Conference; are some of the events he has delivered inspirational keynotes.
He is former Sustainability Program Director and Head of Global Program Management Office at GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines. Previously he also served as Head of Project Portfolio Management at BNP Paribas Fortis and Head of Post-Merger Integration at Fortis Bank, leading the acquisition of ABN AMBRO, the largest in financial service history. He also worked for ten years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, becoming the global lead practitioner for project and change management.
Born in Madrid, Spain, and educated in Germany, Mexico, Italy, and the United States, Antonio is fluent in five languages. He is an Economist, has an MBA from London Business School and Insead’s IDP. You can follow Antonio through his LinkedIn Newsletter – Lead Projects Successfully. For more information, visit his website at www.antonionietorodriguez.com. He can be reached via email: antonio.nieto.rodriguez@gmail.com
To view previous works by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez that have been published in the PMWJ, visit his author showcase in the PM World Library at https://pmworldlibrary.net/authors/antonio-nieto-rodriguez/
[1] On the “mum effect” and the “deaf effect” in project reporting see Mark Keil and colleagues; Keil, Smith, Iacovou and Thompson, “The Pitfalls of Project Status Reporting,” MIT Sloan Management Review.
