2010 is finally history. The economic recovery, which officially began in 2009, was scarcely evident as the US economy muddled through 2010. It seemed that for every piece of good news, like the strong end to the 2010 Christmas shopping season, was countered by news of a setback, such as unemployment rates that unexpectedly returned to nearly 10% during the same period.The government’s stimulus efforts have run their course. The TARP program is officially over and tax credits for new home buyers have all expired. The economy now has to perform on its own without all that artificial stimulation.The fed has reduced interest rates to historic lows to internally stimulate the economy. If interest rates were the cause of The Great Recession this action should have revved up the economy and put us back on track. With federal reserve interest rates at 0% the economy should be white-hot. However, high interest rates are not the problem, so lowering them did not spark an economic rebound. Here’s why with my forecast for 2011:Unemployment Will Probably Stay Stuck Near 10%The dirty little secret behind this statistic is that the 10% figure represents only those who currently have no earned income. Those who are working one or more part-time jobs because they can’t find a full-time work, are underemployed in their field, or who are laboring out-of-bounds of their education or training are considered by the government to be employed. When this expanded population is taken into account, the actual unemployment/underemployment statistic is most likely double the official figure.Unfortunately, there are now multiple barriers to lowering our now chronically high unemployment level. Some of the most important are:The huge oversupply of foreclosed and unsold homes – The reasoning here is straightforward: there is no need for new construction in a saturated market, which means no construction jobs. Jobs in support industries that supply new home construction goods and services will obviously also be affected. More on this topic below.
Continued restraint in consumer spending – more on this topic below.
Major (and many smaller) corporations continue to outsource overseas everything from manufacturing to admin support – much is made of sending low skill or semi-skilled manufacturing jobs overseas, while the US supposedly maintains its edge through high tech startups at home. The government likes to point to numerous high tech startup companies as proof this strategy is working.
Some entrepreneurs do successfully start corporations that may eventually employ 50 white collar workers. However, the product they create is outsourced to manufacturing overseas in a factory that employs perhaps 5000 workers to produce it. Granted, it may cost less per unit to manufacture there, but those 5000 low skilled or semi-skilled workers employed there are exactly the type of person most likely to be unemployed in the US.
So, manufacturing, the great economic engine that for over 100 years was the promise of the high school graduate being able to enter the middle class, is essentially gone, which in great measure explains the growing class rift in our nation.
Note that when manufacturing is sent overseas, the outsourcing company essentially has to teach the foreign corporation how to create the new product, which is new knowledge that a foreign power can use to its own benefit. China is the best example of this. We have successfully trained and paid the Chinese (and others) to beat us at our own game, as evidenced by China’s growing economic might and a political presence that now must be reckoned with.
Hiring temporary workers, rather than in-house employees – temporary or contract workers are far cheaper to hire than in-house employees who qualify for benefits like health insurance and the retirement program. The company owes no loyalty to temps or contractors, and they can be hired and fired at will.
Corporations no longer hire employees with “potential” or experience in parallel or complementary industries – major corporations have ceased to think long-term in many areas, shifting their focus nearly exclusively to near term actions that produce short-term results. Examples of this myopic view range from focusing on the next quarter’s stock earnings per share to viewing employees as a short-term commodity rather than long-term assets.
Viewing employees as a commodity results in corporate behavior of hiring what’s needed for the moment and discharging them when the immediate need disappears, which in turn results in a goal of only searching for and hiring employees “who can make an immediate contribution to the bottom line.”
The exponential increase in education, credential, and experience criteria for candidate employees over and above actual position requirements – new hire employees are now expected to “hit the ground running” and be able to “make an immediate contribution to the bottom line.” Like a new electronic gadget, a new employee should be able to “work right out of the box.”
This new expectation was unheard of only a few years ago during the era when employees were a valuable asset to be invested in over the long term. Then, new hires weren’t expected to be able to make meaningful contributions until they had been with a corporation long enough to learned the ropes.
Now, most hiring authorities don’t even make the effort to understand what skill set is actually required to perform the job they’re hiring for. So, advanced degrees, myriad commercial certificates, and recent experience in everything are specified in the hope that the overkill will result in a person eventually hired that can do the job.
These excessive requirements are then passed to the human resources (HR) department, which dutifully uses them as an inflexible tool to screen the applicant database. The popularity of online employment applications has exacerbated this problem, where the HR person can enter “MBA” as a search term and never see the many capable, well qualified people who are discarded because they don’t have this degree.
As an example, you may not need an engineer with an MBA to be the head of a maintenance department. The better candidate may well be a military veteran non-commissioned officer (NCO) who successfully ran a repair depot. Hiring the former NCO would bring superb talent and a broad background into the organization, could probably be hired at a substantial savings for the company, and may stay with the company longer than the highly credentialed engineer who is intent on furthering his career climbing the corporate ladder.
Further, most large corporations have returned to profitability during the Great Recession through extreme cost cutting, mostly through layoffs in their labor force. Employees who survived the purges were told to take on the extra responsibilities of their former colleagues, so technically the same amount of work is being performed by fewer people (which is responsible for the great gains in national productivity figures compiled by the government and widely reported in the media). This approach obviously places all the necessary skill set eggs into fewer baskets, which creates entirely predictable problems when the new multi-taskers eventually leave and corporations try to replace them with another single person who can do the newly defined mega-job, rather than spreading skills (and risk) over several employees.
The well documented bias against hiring the unemployed – On the surface this bias may seem counterintuitive, after all, someone who’s unemployed is readily available and could probably start Monday, right?
However, the corporate thought process generally follows this logic path; “most corporations layoff their least productive workers during a downsizing, therefore if you’re unemployed you were among the least desirable or productive workers or you wouldn’t have been laid off. It follows then that there must be something wrong with you that we don’t know about, otherwise you would be employed” regardless of your skill set, recent experience, or personal references.
It’s unfortunate that this twisted and nonsensical logic that is frequently imposed on situational “outsiders”, from marital status to any of society’s other membership groupings, has now found its way into corporate hiring mentality.I recommend Louis Uchitelle’s book, The Disposable American, for more on this topic. (I have no financial interest in this recommendation.)The unemployment bottom line – The unemployment/underemployment rate will little change in 2011, with those fitting the categories above most affected.Real Estate Foreclosures Will Continue at a Record Pace and Housing Prices Will Remain Depressed in Most Areas of the CountryThe government statistics here are shocking, with estimates that nearly half (HALF!) of all homeowners with mortgages have homes that currently appraise for less than the mortgage value; they’re “upside down”. Further, nearly 20% of all mortgages nationwide were in some stage of foreclosure at the end of 2010, with rates much higher in the hardest hit states of Michigan, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and California.The efforts of the banking industry to work through this massive backlog lead to the “robo-signing” fiasco, where foreclosure paperwork was being routinely approved under oath en mass without verifying what was being attested to in the court documents. Faced with active investigations by attorneys-general in all 50 states, banks temporarily suspended foreclosure proceedings during the 4th quarter of 2010 to straighten out the mess they created, which the news media widely (and inaccurately) reported as a sign the economy is improving. However, the backlog must be worked through to get the bad debt off the banks’ books, so foreclosures will resume at perhaps even a greater pace when the paperwork is straightened out, probably by the second quarter of 2011.The huge inventory of foreclosed and otherwise unsold homes will keep housing prices depressed. As long as there are so many unsold homes on the market (with more to arrive when the banks resume foreclosure processing), the oversupply will keep prices down and may drive them ever lower in 2011. Even after the foreclosure backlog is reduced, many new home sale listings will appear on the market when prices start to rise from the concealed backlog of those who want or need to sell, but didn’t list when prices were low, which will depress prices again. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took until 2015 to work through this immediate and hidden backlog.The real estate bottom line – in most markets, residential real estate values will remain depressed or will decline further in the high impact states. Now is the time to buy if you have income security, the necessary available cash, an astronomical credit rating to qualify for a mortgage, and can find a bank willing to lend.Energy Prices Should be StableRecent articles in authoritative publications have reported that on-shore crude oil storage is full to capacity and that mothballed tankers functioning simply as floating storage tanks are anchored off the coasts of Great Britain and Iran. A recent inventory showed that 50+ tankers were anchored off of the coast of England alone.Most oil producing countries derive the majority of their national income from crude oil sales, so their incentive is to keep pumping, regardless of market price, in order to maintain their revenue stream, which will keep supplies abundant. So, the world is awash in crude oil, with inventory stores in excess of demand, putting downward pressure on gasoline prices. Overall, gas prices should remain relatively stable during the first half of the year, absent an unplanned disruption like a major refinery fire or a hurricane that destroys oil platforms. That’s good news for every household and corporate budget in our petroleum-based economy.The wild card is China, again. Prior to the recession, China became a net importer of crude oil and was starting to compete on the world market for the limited supply of crude available (remember $150 per barrel spot market crude?). If other world economies improve and start consuming more oil, then everyone will return to competing for limited energy supplies on the world market. And China will most certainly win any contest here, because their trade surplus has given them an unlimited supply of dollars to buy oil with.The energy bottom line – energy prices will most likely slowly increase throughout the year as the fragile recovery continues and the economies of the world pick up steam.An alternative scenario is that energy prices remain stable when China’s real estate bubble collapses (see 2011 Economic Forecast – Part 1: The World View from a US Perspective for elaboration on this possibility), causing a large loss of personal wealth for the average Chinese citizen, dramatically driving down internal consumption, and leading to China’s own internal economic recession.Crude prices will not decline because OPEC will adjust production to maintain oil in the $90-$100 price range.Consumer Spending Will Remain FlatPeople out of work spend only what they have to on the barest necessities. People who are afraid they will be next out of work, cut back on spending in order to save for what might come to pass, and also focus on buying only the practical, needed, and necessary. People who are secure in their jobs, but don’t want to be seen conspicuously consuming during hard times, will curtail their luxury purchases. Need I say more?Further, it’s underreported that the historically low interest rates have meant a sharp drop in savings interest income for retirees. Retirees dependent on interest income have had to sharply reduce their spending in order to avoid further encroachment on their principal. Typically, the budget cuts include things like the lawn service contract, the beauty shop, dry cleaning, and eating out, all of which impacts local businesses.The modest economic improvement widely reported during the last half of 2010 is probably the result of businesses simply restocking depleted inventories to low levels, which is good news but not great news. However, the buying surge that turned the 2010 Christmas shopping season into a last minute success means that retailers will start 2011 on better financial footing because they won’t have to start the year having to liquidate seasonal inventory (and profits) at 50%-70% off to generate cash flow.Additional reasons that I think consumer spending will continue to be restrained in 2011 include the increased personal savings rate (an eventual benefit, but lowers consumer spending in the short term), a focus on reducing credit card debt, unplanned new car payments in the household budget resulting from the federal Cash for Clunkers program, and credit that’s either not available at any price or only at unfavorable interest rates and terms when it is.The consumer spending bottom line – consumer spending on non-essential purchases will continue to be restrained in 2011. When consumers do make purchases, they will focus on the needed, necessary, and practical, and avoid luxury items even if they can afford them. Family vacations will be to local or regional destinations, rather than the exotic venues.The Credit-Starved EconomyIt’s widely reported that large corporations are currently hoarding large amounts of cash. This stockpile gives them the ability to hire, expand production, and grow organically if they wanted to, but they are refusing to do so in light of what I’ve shared above. Even a White House meeting with the president in 2010 wasn’t enough to persuade them to resume hiring if they can meet market demand with staff on hand.However, large corporations continue to have aspirations to grow and, rather than slowly growing organically, the method they’re often choosing is rapid growth through acquiring their competition. When companies combine, the result may possibly be good for the new, larger corporation (the marriages generally have a 50-50 chance of commercial success), but the result always has two negative economic impacts:
The cash and loans required to buy the competitor removes large amounts of capital from the market that would otherwise be available for mortgages and loans to small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), and
Mergers always result in layoffs as the new corporation works to eliminate duplicate functions to help pay for the merger. After all, you don’t need two payroll departments, two HR departments, two training departments, etc.So, large corporate mergers have a break even chance of internal benefit, but nearly always have a negative impact on the economy.Credit will most likely continue to be tight for SMBs in 2011. Banks say they have money to lend in this area, but the reality is the qualifying bar is set so high that very few will be able to meet it. It’s noteworthy that this economic barrier persists despite the availability of government Small Business Administration loan guarantees and the president repeatedly summoning banking CEO’s to the White House to urge them to begin lending again.Finally, a common source of loan collateral for SMBs is no longer available in most cases. In areas hard hit by the collapse of the real estate market, the business owner’s home equity line of credit has been completely erased if the property value is now less that the outstanding mortgage balance. Even if there is some equity technically available, few business owners have the stratospheric credit scores necessary to qualify for the loans.If longer term loans remain unavailable, SMB’s will turn to the only recourse they have left, which is financing their need for operating cash with personal credit card debt. Unfortunately, this option is fraught with danger because lending institutions issuing credit cards are rapidly changing card terms, raising interest rates to usurious levels, requiring most new cards to have variable interest rates (a practice which helped get us into this mess in the first place), and lowering credit limits in response to the new federal laws enacted in February 2010. These moves effectively sidestep the legislation intended to curb these abuses.At a time when banks can borrow at 0% from the fed, it’s not uncommon for the credit cards they issue to charge 15% or more on outstanding balances. Further, the new laws do not apply to corporate credit cards, exposing the company to even greater financial risk if the owner is forced to finance via this route.The credit bottom line – expect little or no improvement in credit availability in 2011.The Impending Commercial Real Estate TsunamiCommercial real estate values and investment income will probably take a drubbing as vacant store fronts drive down rents renegotiated in 2011. Failing businesses have created a glut of vacant commercial space in many areas and vacant commercial space doesn’t generate income. Surviving business owners will have several alternative locations to choose from and will use the oversupply as leverage to negotiate lower lease rates for the space they do occupy for as far into the future as possible.And devalued properties of all types will have an adverse effect on local tax digests, forcing local governments to either raise property tax rates or trim operating and school budgets. Which of these choices do you think your local government will make?Deficit Spending and the Growing Threat of the National DebtFiscally, the United States is in a mess and is rapidly approaching the financial meltdown so many European countries are currently experiencing.The annual budget deficit – the federal government currently spends $3 for every $2 of revenue it receives and the annual spending gap is now over a trillion dollars (a TRILLION dollars) a year. Proposals to close this gap through either increased tax revenue, such as eliminating the homeowners mortgage deduction, or by cutting spending, such as cutting back on Medicare entitlements, meet with howls of constituent protests and go nowhere in a hurry. Note that Medicare alone accounts for 12% of all federal spending and that figure is certain to increase as baby boomers begin to retire in large numbers from the workforce.The federal government currently spends $1,000,000,000 more every 8 hours than it brings in. It’s ridiculously obvious that this can’t continue for long, yet collectively Congress keeps kicking the can down the road to tomorrow (figuratively speaking) instead of dealing with the issue.The US government borrows money to support this deficit spending through the sale of US treasury bonds. During World War II the debt was largely financed internally with American citizens buying “war bonds” at rallies that featured real-life war heroes on display.Today we sell our bonds to foreign powers finance the deficit. Who’s buying them? The largest single buyer, by far, is China, followed by Japan, Germany, and the Arab OPEC nations. So, we are effectively (and quietly) being held hostage to those who buy large amounts of our bonds, because if they don’t buy them, then we can’t operate the federal government. It follows, then, that the nations buying our bonds use this leverage to exercise considerable influence in our behavior behind the scenes. We are no longer a totally independent nation.Larry Burkett’s book, The Illuminati, is a fictional work about a foreign country that brings down the United States using exactly this leverage. For those who say that can’t happen, the book makes an interesting read of a plausible scenario. (I have no financial interest in this recommendation.)The national debt – The accumulated national debt has reached an unimaginable size. The previous administration added more to the national debt than all previous presidents combined, including Ronald Reagan’s, and the current administration is on track to exceed this sorry milestone in just its first 4 years in office. We continue to add to this debt, which must be paid back at some point, almost without thought. For example, the president’s much heralded tax deal forged at the end of 2010 added $900 billion dollars to the national debt in extended income tax cuts, additional jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, and a temporary cut in social security taxes without corresponding cuts in social security spending, at the stroke of a pen.Predictions are, depending on interest rates, for interest payments alone to equal all non-defense spending of the federal budget by perhaps 2015.There are only 4 ways out of this mess and they will become increasingly painful the longer we, as a nation, avoid changing our spendthrift ways:
Massively cut spending – this will be very difficult, since the federal budget would have to be immediately cut by 1/3 to be able to simply stop borrowing. It would have to be cut even further to begin paying back principal on the debt.
This step will further impact the national unemployment rate as large numbers of government employees are laid off in the downsizing, as we have seen happen in the European Union bailouts. Most popular government programs would have to be axed or pushed off on the states to fund, such as Medicare, which currently consumes 12% of the annual federal budget alone.
Enacting huge tax increases – this move will generate howls of protest because no one wants to pay more of their hard-earned money for fewer services. As an example, how easy do you think it would be to eliminate the cherished homeowner’s mortgage interest deduction?
Defaulting on the debit payments – this is an admission of bankruptcy, pure and simple. If we take this route the government’s access to credit on the world market would immediately dry up. After all, if we stop paying on our current bond obligations, how many more bonds do you think we could sell to foreign governments the next time we needed to borrow money?
Printing dollar bills – this is the route to hyperinflation, because as the money supply increases the value of each dollar falls. The most often cited example of the folly of taking this route is the Republic of Germany following World War I, as it struggled to meet the surrender terms imposed by the Allies and make payments to the victorious nations for the cost of the war. Germany was forced to print money to meet its financial obligations, sparking the hyperinflation recorded in the pictures of German citizens in the 1920′s hauling wheelbarrows of money to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread.The national debt bottom line – At the present rate of deficit spending, interest payments on the national debt will overwhelm the national budget by 2015. At that point we will be left with 4 stark choices to deal with the mess we’ve created: massively cut federal spending, enact huge tax increases, default on the debit, print money, or do some combination of these choices. The outlook is stark.The US National Forecast Bottom LineWhat does all this mean? Well, in the near term a realistic forecast is to be cautiously optimistic that the fragile recovery will continue, absent any further shocks to our financial system. However, the economy will be dragging a ball-and-chain along with it in the form of high unemployment, depressed commercial and residential real estate markets, the lack of available credit, the corporate preference to acquire the competition rather than hire new employees, and the looming national debt crisis.If the scenarios above make sense to you then my suggestion is for small and medium-sized businesses, like professional practices that depend on elective procedures and service industry businesses, to be prepared for clients and patients to continue to defer discretionary spending until at least the second half of 2011. If you’re a retailer, you should keep inventories lean for the first half of the year.And my personal recommendation is for everyone to reduce their personal debt to as close to zero as possible by 2015.Will this all come to pass? It’s hard to tell because we haven’t been here before, but I’ve shared my best guess. Do you think I nailed it or do you have a different opinion? I look forward to your comments.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the current hot topics of project management. In the 21st century, there is a clear swift from hard systems approach of project management to soft factors, a demand for strategic thinking in project management (Buttrick, 2000), new success factors (Atkinson, 1999) and project uncertainty management (Ward & Chapman, 2003). Broader project management theory and more intense research efforts are also a trend in the field (Winter & Smith, 2005).Human beings have been executing projects from ancient times (Kwak, 2003). From relocating a tribe to constructing enormous buildings such as the pyramids, projects were a dominant element of history. Not long ago, those involved in projects understood that they needed methods and processes to help them manage these projects more efficiently. To meet this need, scientists and practitioners worked together to form a new concept which was called «project management». According to the PMBOK’s definition “project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements”. (A Guide to Project Management Body of Knowledge, 2004). There are many different views in the literature concerning the birth of project management. Maylor (2005) mentions that “project management in the way that we would understand it today did not exist until the 1950s” and Wideman (2001) tracks the first use of project management in the UK’s Institution of Civil Engineers report on UK post war national development first published in 1944.Since then, there have been a lot of changes. “The hard systems approach, which treated the project as a mechanical activity, has been shown to be flawed” (Maylor, 2005). The soft skills of project management are getting more attention because it is now clear that “the ability to apply these skills effectively throughout the life cycle of a project will enhance the success of a project exponentially” (Belzer). In spite of the perfect understanding of planning, scheduling and controlling, projects have still a high rate of failure. Belzer points out that “more often they fail because of a project manager’s inability to communicate effectively, work within the organization’s culture, motivate the project team, manage stakeholder expectations, understand the business objectives, solve problems effectively, and make clear and knowledgeable decisions”. To address these problems in the 21st century, a project team needs to develop a series of soft skills such as “communication, team building, flexibility and creativity, leadership and the ability to manage stress and conflict”. (Sukhoo et. al, 2005).In addition, project management requires a stronger strategy orientation. “More than 80 per cent of all problems at the project level are caused by failures at a board level in firms to provide clear policy and priorities” (Maylor, 2001). The approach that Maylor suggests is very different from the traditional link between strategy and projects, as he proposes a “coherent, co-ordinated, focused, strategic competence in project management which eventually provides source of competitive advantage”. This two-way methodology that relates organisational and project strategy is illustrated in figure 1. To better understand the project’s strategy, there is also a need to analyse “the experiences from past activities, politics during the pre-project phases, parallel courses of events happening during project execution and ideas about the post-project future” (Mats Engwall, 2002).Moreover, Maylor highlights a change in project’s success criteria, from conformance to performance. In 1960s project managers seek to comply only with the documented specifications of the project, while current projects require real performance. In other words, the success criteria of the 21st century as indicated by Maylor have changed to as short time as possible, as cheaply as possible and towards a maximum customer delight. Other academics imply nowadays a much simpler view of success criteria which is focused only in keeping the client happy (Ferguson, 2005) in contrast with the 90s view of just finishing the project on time and on budget.Changes in risk management are also one of the hot topics of project management in the new century. Ward (2003) propose the term «uncertainty management» and recommends that a “focus on «uncertainty» rather than risk could enhance project risk management”. Adams has an interesting view of risk as he describes it as “a reflexive phenomenon – we respond to perceived probabilities and magnitudes, thereby altering them”, a definition that differs from the traditional quantitive analysis of risk. Green broads even more the scope of risk management and includes the clients. He thinks that “the process of risk management only becomes meaningful through the active participation of the client’s project stakeholders”. In his point of view there is a new way of assessing risk management that “depends less upon probabilistic forecasting and more upon the need to maintain a viable political consistency within the client organisation”.The conventional theory of project management consists of a narrow focus on projects as unique and totally separated units of work. But current projects tend to be integrated smoothly in the general context of organizations in order to “develop the «management of project portfolios» and «programme management» which are more strategically orientated towards «doing the right projects»” (Winter & Smith, 2005).
It is common ground in the literature that the theory of project management needs more research. Koskela and Howell (2002) suggest that the theoretical base “has been implicit and it rests on a faulty understanding of the nature of work in projects, and deficient definitions of planning, execution and control”. From their point of view, enrichment of project management with new methods and techniques cannot be done with any stable theoretical background. As a result, there is a trend of putting more effort in research and rethinking the way which «bodies of knowledge» is written so that complex projects’ actions will be better documented.As a conclusion, we could use the words of D.T. Jones (2005) who writes that “project management is no longer about managing the sequence of steps required to complete the project on time”. He adds that “it is about systematically incorporating the voice of the customer, creating a disciplined way of prioritising effort and resolving trade-offs, working concurrently on all aspects of the projects in multi-functional teams”.References1. A Guide to Project Management Body of Knowledge, 2004, 3rd Edition, Project Management Institute2. Adams, Review for THES Risk Decision and Policy, Cambridge University Press, [Electronic]3. Atkinson, 1999, Project management: cost, time and quality, two best guesses and a phenomenon, its time to accept other success criteria, International Journal of Project Management Vol. 17, No. 6, pp. 337±342, [Electronic]4. Belzer, Project Management : Still More Art than Science, [Electronic]5. Buttrick, 2000, The project workout, 2nd edition6. Engwall, 2003, No project is an island: linking projects to history and context, Research Policy 32, pp. 789-808, [Electronic]7. Ferguson, 2005, First Tutorial on Strategic Management, Full Time MSc in Project Management, Lancaster University8. Green, Towards an integrated script for risk and value management, Department of Construction Management & Engineering, The University of Reading, UK9. Jones, 2005, Foreward to Maylor’s book Project Management, FT Prentice Hall, UK10. Koskela & Howell, 2002, The underlying theory of project management is obsolete, Project Management Institute, [Electronic]11. Kwak, 2003, The Story of Managing Projects, Quorum Books, [Electronic]12. Maylor, 2005, Project Management, FT Prentice Hall, UK13. Maylor, 2001, Beyond the Gantt Chart:: Project Management Moving on, European Management Journal Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 92-100, 2001, UK, [Electronic]14. Sukhoo, Barnard, Eloff, Van der Poll Accommodating Soft Skills in Software Project Management, Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa, [Electronic]15. Ward, 2003, Transforming project risk management into project uncertainty management, International Journal of Project Management vol.21, pp. 97-105, [Electronic]16. Wideman, 2001, Criteria for a Project Management body of knowledge, [Electronic]17. Winter & Smith, 2005, ‘Rethinking Project Management, Making Sense So Far: Emerging Directions and Future Research’, Rethinking Project Management (EPSRC Network 2004-2006), [Electronic]

Out of all that’s being offered, to pick the best Seattle salon and the best Seattle spa isn’t an easy task. If you pick up the Yellow Pages you’ll find a whole list of salons in Seattle, but which one is best for your personal needs? Well that’s probably right where the decisive factor lies: your personal Seattle day spa and salon needs.Are you looking for a new hairdo; for a wonderful Seattle pedicure or Seattle manicure, that’ll leave your hands and feet feeling like silk and your nails just gorgeous; are you dying to get a spa facial or body treatment or a wonderful spa massage, with soft music, aroma therapy and the works? Or do you need a waxing salon or professional make-up done. And since Seattle isn’t exactly the sunniest of places, maybe you’d like to get a tan. And what if you really need any or all of these, but you’d much rather receive these services at home, instead of having to drive all over town?For all of these Seattle salon and spa needs you can find different establishments spread all throughout the city, but ideally you’d like them all to be in one place, even an in-home service, should your special event require it. Now, that will narrow down your search considerably, since such an oasis isn’t easily found in a big city like Seattle.So why should we take some moments every now and then to visit the best Seattle salon and Seattle spa? Well, life’s busy for most of us these days and stress takes its toll. We want to be able to do it all and have it all, but at times we over-extend ourselves and our bodies, well-being and beauty begin to suffer.Sometimes we just need to step on the brakes and to take some time to take care of ourselves; give ourself-esteem a boost with a new look and pamper our body with a beautifying facial wax, a salon manicure, salon pedicure and spa massages to loosen up all those tense muscles that have had to absorb our stress.The best Seattle salon and spa is the perfect oasis to step out of your hurried life for a moment into another dimension of calm, soothing relaxation spa treatments, massages, facials, whatever you can imagine to find relaxation and be able to let go of the daily grind, even if only for a few hours at a time.Being too busy can make us sick. If we don’t take moments to balance out the stressy parts of life, we are bound to encounter health problems – physical, emotional and even mental.To step back and unwind is not a luxury, but a necessity. And if you only work, work, work, without being able to enjoy the fruits of your labor, what’s the point in the first place? Can’t take it with you, may as well spend some in the best Seattle salon and spa to get those grinding gears to run smoothly again.So when you splurge on a spa day, are you being wasteful? Not at all; rather you’re investing in your all over health and well-being. A few well deserved moments at the best Seattle salon and spa day isn’t just an expense, but an investment in one of the most important parts of your life: your physical, mental and emotional health.Plan for regular treatments in the best Seattle salon and best Seattle spa right in your budget, that way it won’t knock your checkbook out of balance, which then again would cause additional stress… (which then would require another spa day to recoup… )Make it part of your budget from the get go and you’ll always have that special day at the best Seattle salon and spa to look forward to.