Lessons from PMI Global Congress (Part 2)

Mike Griffiths is an experienced project manager, author and consultant who works for PMI as a subject matter expert. Before joining PMI, Mike consulted and managed innovation and technology projects throughout Europe, North and South America for 30+ years. He was co-lead for the PMBOK Guide—Seventh Edition, lead for the Agile Practice Guide, and contributor to the PMI-ACP and PMP exam content outlines. Outside of PMI, Mike maintains the websites www.LeadingAnswers.com about leading teams and www.PMillustrated.com, which teaches project management for visual learners.

  Organizational Project Management   Resource Management   Strategy  

This is the concluding installment of my account of attending the recent PMI Global Congress 2016—North America in San Diego. In Part 1, we learned how I awoke in my hotel room with only one kidney, why ideas stick and the leadership tools presented in the Afterburner presentation. In this article I would like to share my thoughts on the other stand-out presentation I attended: Sue Gardener’s “The Future of Work” keynote presentation.

Where the Afterburner presentation was an Indiana Jones action-packed linear tour of practical advice, this was more of a “Fight Club”—intellectual timeline-jumping exploration into team work that left as many questions unanswered as it addressed, but was all the better for it.

Sue Gardner began her career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), an old-school institution of an organization that was bureaucratic and slow to change. Working as director of the new website and online news outlets, she faced challenges trying to drag a large and slow-moving organization into the 21^st Century.

These challenges were reversed in her next role as executive director for the Wikimedia Foundation, parent of Wikipedia as it rapidly grew from eight to 200 engineers. She moved the team from Florida to Silicon …

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