The PM PrepCast^™
Leadership Academy

Astronaut and Healthcare CEO

astrodavemd.ca

Apply NASA and healthcare leadership experience to become a better project leader. (74 minutes)

Dafydd Rhys Williams is a Canadian physician, public speaker, CEO, author and a retired CSA astronaut. He was selected to join NASA and was a mission specialist on two space shuttle missions in 1998 and 2007, during which he became the third Canadian to perform a spacewalk. In 2011, Williams became the new President and CEO of Southlake Regional Health Centre, the regional hospital in Newmarket, Ontario, to lead the facility into becoming a full-fledged teaching and research center. He continued in this role until October 2017 when he left Southlake to work as a healthcare and aerospace consultant.

In this leadership interview he draws from his experience at NASA and as a CEO and not only recounts many leadership moments but also masterfully relates why they matter and how project leaders can apply them to become better at what they do.

Community Development Leader

Jonathan Kline is a community development specialist who spent his childhood in Europe and Africa and adulthood in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. This gave Jonathan a deep love for exploration and the desire to truly hear the stories of the people he meets.

He studied at Sterling College and Cornell University with a focus on Sustainable Agriculture, International Agriculture & Rural Development and has over a decade of experience in the international humanitarian sphere. He mainly works in the areas of Food Security, Agriculture, and Livelihoods, including numerous engagements with government agencies, non-profits, and international NGOs.

He has worked as an executive director on multiple occasions, both overseas and in the US. Most recently, he has been engaged as Executive Director of the Whidbey Homeless Coalition and is currently working with Cross International to help unpack a community development strategy for the organization.

He got the opportunity to talk about this subject he’s so passionate about in his Tedx Talk: “Shut Up and Listen– Locally Focused Community-Driven Solution.”

When not working, Jonathan can be found hanging out with his wife, Jessie, and their four kids paddling around the Puget Sound or hiking through the mountains with their two malamutes.

TEDx Leadership Speaker

drewdudley.com

Discover everyday leadership and why you matter as a leader. (79 minutes)

Drew Dudley is recognized as one of the most dynamic leadership speakers in the world, has spoken to over 250,000 people on 5 continents, and has been featured on The Huffington Post, Radio America, Forbes.com, and TED.com.

Drew’s interest in developing people’s leadership began when he was the Leadership Development coordinator at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. During this time he also appeared at TEDxToronto 2010, where he delivered a leadership talk that would go on to generate more than 5 million views around the web.

He believes leadership is not a characteristic reserved for the extraordinary and works to help people discover the leader within themselves.

Select leadership topics examined in the interview: Everyday leaders, developing your leadership values, and the question "Why do you matter?".

NYT Bestselling Author

tompeters.com

Tom Peters is an American writer on business management practices, best known for In Search of Excellence —the book that changed the way the world does business and is often tagged as the best business book ever.

He is a civil engineering graduate of Cornell, and he earned an MBA and a Ph.D. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has been honored by dozens of associations in content areas such as management, leadership, quality, human resources, campaigning for more women in senior leadership positions, customer service, innovation, marketing, and design.

Tom founded Skunkworks Inc., The Palo Alto Consulting Center, and The Tom Peters Company, all in Palo Alto. (Tom was on the first San Jose Mercury list of 100 most powerful people in Silicon Valley.) He and his wife Susan Sargent—tapestry weaver, textiles entrepreneur, community and climate change activist—after residing many years on a 1,400-acre farm in Vermont, now live on the edge of Buzzard’s Bay in South Dartmouth, MA.

Eighteen books and thirty-five years later, Tom is still at the forefront of the “management guru industry” he single-handedly invented. What’s new? A lot. As CNN said, “While most business gurus milk the same mantra for all it’s worth, the one-man brand called Tom Peters is still reinventing himself.” His most recent effort is Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism. Tom’s unwavering focus is on putting people first and developing leaders who stay in intimate touch with the front-liners who do the real work. In November 2017, Tom received the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Leadership Expert and Author

susannemadsen.co.uk

PMI Profile

Practice the power of project leadership (84 minutes)

Susanne Madsen is an internationally recognized project leadership coach, trainer and consultant. She is the award-winning author of The Power of Project Leadership (now in 2nd edition) and The Project Management Coaching Workbook. Working with organizations across the globe she delivers leadership development programs and executive coaching to help project and change managers step up and become better leaders.

In this interview, we go beyond the concepts presented in her writings and dig deeper to provide hands-on advice on how to frame and apply her leadership approaches.

Select leadership topics examined in the interview: Project Leadership Matrix, proactive leadership, feel the fear and do it anyway, six human needs, intuition, leadership values, congruence, leadership scandals, leading up, project vision, path of least resistance is of no interest to the project leader, team empowerment, and virtual leader.

Retired US Army

stan-mcchrystal

Lead your team through detecting and responding to risk. (71 minutes)

In June 2009, the President of the United States and the Secretary-General of NATO appointed Stan McChrystal to be the Commander of US Forces Afghanistan and UN’s International Security Assistance Force. His command included more than 150,000 troops from 45 allied countries. On August 1, 2010, he retired from the US Army.

Stan McChrystal founded McChrystal Group in January 2011 to deliver innovative leadership solutions to businesses globally in order to help them transform and succeed in challenging, dynamic environments. As Founder and Partner, he advises senior executives at multinational corporations on navigating complex change and building stronger teams.

Select leadership topics examined in the interview: Teams, risk control factors (definition and leading the implementation), vision and mission, changing strategies, and communications.

CIO

Harness the power of your team's emotions to achieve extraordinary performance. (63 minutes)

Jackie Barretta has a 25-year history as a successful Fortune 500 C-level executive and Big Four consultant in the Information Technology industry. She has led large organizations and projects with hundreds of employees through challenging times and major transformations.

Jackie’s work with primal emotions in teams has won her widespread recognition and dozens of prestigious awards, including ComputerWorld’s Premier 100 IT Leaders, Information Week’s Innovator of the Year, and CIO Magazine’s Enterprise Value Award. She has served on the advisory boards of Hewlett Packard, Teradata, and the CIO Executive Council.

Select leadership topics examined in the interview: Teams, emotions, disagreements, reducing fear, leadership and gamification, sixth sense, glass ceiling, women leaders, and gender-equal workplace.

US Army

A leader takes care of her people (81 minutes)

After finishing college, Jill E. Johnson enlisted in the Army Reserve in 2002, after the 9/11 events really moved her and pushed her to get involved in something bigger than herself. She deployed to Iraq in 2004 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and she’s been serving in the Army since then. Her leadership positions include Squad Leader, Team Sergeant, Detachment Sergeant, Platoon Sergeant, Acting First Sergeant, and then she was promoted to Sergeant Major, which is in the top 1% of leadership roles in the Army, with only two ranks above her.

In this leadership interview, we draw parallels from her experience as a project leader and other leadership positions in the US Army to leadership positions in the private sector.

Select leadership topics examined in the interview: The power of recommendations, implied leadership, civil affairs, career strategy, mentors, the athletic leader, courage, curiosity, confidence, charisma, moving up, and winners and losers.

Leadership Researcher

emadrahim.com

Apply the S.A.L.T. model to overcome leadership struggles. (72 minutes)

Dr. Rahim is a genocide survivor and refugee of the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields of Cambodia.

He arrived in the United States with his family as a refugee living in Brooklyn, New York and was raised in Syracuse, NY. After struggling with street violence, gangs, drugs, poverty, family abuse and dyslexia as an adolescent, he found his way through higher education to become an award-winning educator, entrepreneur, author and community leader.

He developed the S.A.L.T. model of Surviving, Adapting, Loving and Transforming as a means of helping him overcome the struggles of his youth, including prejudice, abuse, childhood violence, and dyslexia. Emad learned to turn tragedy into triumph and will help you navigate the difficult challenges we all encounter in life – and on projects – and leverage those abilities for your very own leadership success.

Select leadership topics examined in the interview: The S.A.L.T. model, coaching, and ethics.

NYT Bestselling Author

danpink.com

Daniel H. Pink is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, published in February. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind and the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies worldwide.

Before venturing out on his own 20 years ago, Dan worked in several positions in politics and government, including serving from 1995 to 1997 as chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore.

Pink was the host and co-executive producer of “Crowd Control,” a television series about human behavior on the National Geographic Channel that aired in more than 100 countries. He hosts a popular MasterClass on sales and persuasion. He has appeared frequently on NPR, PBS, ABC, CNN, and other TV and radio networks in the US and abroad.

He has been a contributing editor at Fast Company and Wired as well as a business columnist for The Sunday Telegraph. His articles and essays have also appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Slate, and other publications.

Pink and his wife live in Washington, DC. They are the parents of two recent college graduates and a college freshman.

Kristen Cox is a senior executive, university fellow and instructor, a keynote speaker, published author, trainer, and consultant. She’s the world's leading authority on how to apply the Theory of Constraints to governments and non-profits. She is a senior executive, university fellow and instructor, keynote speaker, published author, trainer, consultant, and co-founder of The Fulcrum--her private, online, TOC training community.

She was also the former Executive Director of the Governor's Office of Management and Budget (GOMB) for the State of Utah, where she orchestrated a 35 percent improvement across Utah's $20B executive branch.

She is the co-author of two books, Stop Decorating the Fish and The World of Decorating the Fish along with Dr. Yishai Ashlag.

Psychologist

practicalrecovery.com

How to change and become a better project leader. (64 minutes)

Best known for his book "Sex, Drugs, Gambling, and Chocolate", addiction specialist, author and public speaker Tom Horvath, Ph.D., ABPP counsels and coaches business leaders across industries and helps them deal with the struggles that come with addiction to power.

He is using this experience as the foundation for our interview as we explore the topic of project leadership from the unique perspective of a psychologist. He shares insights into what makes good and bad habits in leadership and the challenges you can expect. In particular, he discusses ways that a project manager who is stepping up to be a project leader can learn to let go of needing to know the details around each project task and how to lead their team to success.

Select leadership topics examined in the interview: approaches to leadership, changing to become a better leader, and avoiding the pitfalls of becoming addicted to power through listening and servant leadership.

mbs.works

Make "The Coaching Habit" part of your leadership competency. (71 minutes)

Michael Bungay Stanier wrote "The Coaching Habit", which is the best-selling coaching book of this century, with nearly a million copies sold and thousands of five-star reviews on Amazon. In 2019, he was named the #1 thought leader in coaching.

He and his company Box of Crayons have trained hundreds of thousands of managers to be more coach-like and their clients range from Microsoft to Gucci. He is at the forefront of shaping how organizations around the world make being coach-like an essential leadership skill.

In this leadership interview Michael teaches you two approaches borne out of his thought leader approaches: The process of how to begin being a (better) leader, as well as a review of the seven essential questions from "The Coaching Habit" and how we as leaders can apply them when leading our project teams.

Select leadership topics examined in the interview: the beginnings of a (better) leader and the coaching habit.

Leadership Expert

shyaam-ramanathan.medium.com

Maximize your leadership potential. (73 minutes)

Shyam Ramanathan has over 21 years of leadership experience in the IT world. He has been writing on leadership topics for the last decade and has written two books: Maximize Potential and Maximize Potential 2. The book titles represent his mission, which is to maximize his potential and help others maximize theirs.

Select leadership topics examined in the interview: Leaders in sport, leading the team, what makes a great leader, winners and losers, slipping up in business, ethics, moving into other leadership roles and leaving a legacy.

Maestro

talgam.com

Build and lead your team with the poise and style of a conductor. (70 minutes)

Itay Talgam studied at the Rubin Academy and received a degree in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He started out as a pianist but switched to conducting after his military service in the Israel Defense Forces. He attended a summer course given by Leonard Bernstein in Fontainebleau, France and has worked with most of the major orchestras in Israel.

As a classical conductor, he uses his experiences from the podium to provide fascinating insights into what it means to be a great leader. Renowned as a 'conductor of people', he draws from 20 years of his experience on the podium to teach non-musicians the art of leading like a conductor - from CEOs to entrepreneurs, politicians to project managers.

Let him empower you to lead your team to greater harmony.

Select leadership topics examined in the interview: Leadership style, building many teams, accidental project managers, leading into tomorrow, leaving your comfort zone, and embracing your gaps.