PMI Montgomery County
Monthly Dinner Meeting/ Presentation
February 7, 2007

Topic:   Leadership and Management Lessons from a Horse !!

Biography:  Harold Kurstedt, PhD.  
 
Harold Kurstedt is the Hal G. Prillaman Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and is director of Virginia Tech's systems engineering program. Harold has been searching for the secrets of good management for 30 years. Harold discovered that doing good management and hence quality were a matter of organizational culture change, ultimately based on personal change. Today, Harold recognizes that all organizations must improve their relationship competence to the level of their technical competence and all managers and leaders must do more coaching than problem solving or the human resource will under-perform. Effective leadership in an organization must come from everyone in the organization and is directed at recognizing and surfacing the strengths of others and gathering those strengths and moving them toward a common vision. This leadership is solution-focused. Solution-focused thinking is based on a blend of natural laws and basic principles from systems engineering, personal change, and marriage and family therapy.

Biography:   Pamela Kurstedt

Pamela Kurstedt is CEO and President of Newport Group, LLC, providing consulting, education, and training to professional service organizations through applying systems thinking to developing effective solutions.  Newport Group, LLC is dedicated to helping organizations manage from a systems perspective – to solve management and leadership problems and to help individuals with communication and self-management through personal development.  Pamela recently retired from Virginia Tech as Assistant Dean for Enrichment and International Programs and Director of the College of Engineering, Northern Virginia Center in Falls Church, VA.  She was a member of the Dean's Staff from 1977 until 2004. 

To view their presentation, please click here .

Project managers find themselves between a rock and a hard place.  The rock is providing the product or service that will delight the client.  The hard place is making a good profit for the company.  These two responsibilities usually work against one another.  But, there's the other hard place!!  The other hard place is motivating and guiding a productive project team.  In leading and managing people, we can learn a lot from working with a horse.  This presentation will describe 20 lessons project managers need to keep in mind when working with people.  Whether we consider corporate management, the client, or the project team, it's all about getting the best from the people we deal with.  Attendees will learn specific attitudes and actions they can use immediately in their projects.

This dinner meeting presentation will be worth one "category 3" PDU.

Our mission is to provide a forum for Professional Project Managers to promote the principles of Project Management Institute (PMI) through networking with other Project Managers, sharing project experiences, providing and receiving training, and supporting Project Management Professionals in their certification efforts.  Our intent is to provide this forum in a place that is convenient to those who either live and/or work in Montgomery County, Maryland.
 
For those of you who were able to attend, thank you.

Sincerely,
Charlie Geis, PMP, MBA
President
PMI Montgomery County, Maryland Chapter