Center Stage: The Voice of The Project Economy

Dr. Yousuf Ahmad has over 25 years of healthcare experience including health insurance, physician group practices, and multi-hospital health system. For the past 5 years, he has been leading AssureCare, transforming it from a start-up to a high-growth company with industry leading care management technology platforms.
In this episode of Center Stage, Dr. Ahmad shares the importance of learning and gaining knowledge in his journey in the healthcare industry from programmer, to president of a large health system, to the CEO of a healthcare technology company. He speaks to the importance of building collaborative, motivated teams with open communication and commitment to an agreed-upon set of outcomes.
Dr. Ahmad also offers insight into how technology, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, is revolutionizing healthcare, from increasing diagnostic accuracy on mammograms to improving racial disparities in care and health outcomes. As technology continues to evolve, practitioners including project managers must be open to lifelong learning to remain relevant and future proof their careers.

How good is your company at change management? How can we combine technology and change to improve performance? How can organizations create more effective environments of learning? How do we find the hidden talent within our organization? This Center Stage podcast is with professor and entrepreneur Dr. Nabeel Ahmad about the disruptive effects of change, automation and data on talent development. Dr. Ahmad is Chief Strategy Officer of Changeforce.AI, a software platform for helping organizations to change faster. This discussion is focused on keeping up with the rapid pace of change though technology that helps people focus on critical strategy outcomes and finding the hidden talent within an organization.

Katrina Pugh, a faculty member and former Academic Director of Columbia University’s Information and Knowledge Strategy (IKNS) Master of Science program, helps our Center Stage audience explore the value of networks. Kate has over 20 years of consulting and industry experience in the financial services, life sciences, energy, information technology, and international development sectors. She was co-investigator with Monash University on a PMI-funded research study, Building project managers capability: Knowledge transfer in projects using knowledge networks.
Kate emphasizes how networks build interdependence and spaces where people come together for conversation, collaboration and co-creation. She highlights the significant variety in networks, spreading a spectrum of possible outcomes, from marketable products, to providing just-in-time problem-solving, to providing solidarity and scale. She also helps us distinguish between enduring networks and time-bounded project teams.
Given work and other pressures, one might ask, “What’s the value of investing in networks?” Kate walks us through the knowledge-sharing and knowledge-creation benefits from networks, resulting from the network’s capitalizing on its diversity of thought, reach, scale, and sense of belonging. A leading value of networks is the efficiency that comes from stacking experiences and solutions, rather than reinventing the wheel. This pooled knowledge can help organizations and professionals accelerate projects and reduce time-to-market. Research has shown that networked projects far outperform non-networked projects.
Networks generate benefits for professionals but also for their employers. Staff engaged in networks become better risk-takers, advocates and innovators for the business and for customers. Encouraging network engagement demonstrates management’s support for employee growth and professional development. And, it goes without saying that organizations benefit by learning faster about key developments and capabilities outside of their walls.
Networks need a vision, governance, expertise and energy to be successful. Focus helps network participants concentrate their attention. Governance and structure need to be tailored to enable the right forms of engagement. For example, networks focused on members’ problem-solving need different structures from those which are co-creating products like open source software. And all networks need a variety of people with expertise, willingness to share and ability to reach out to others to help the network grow and thrive. Over time, networks may need to refresh to stay relevant and broaden their diversity of thought, experiences and perspectives. When aligned to the organization’s strategy, networks can prove to be a cost-effective pathway to market innovation, job satisfaction, and project efficiency.

To explore more about networks, check out Kate’s books on the topic:
· Smarter Innovation: How Interactive Processes Drive Better Business Results (Ark Group, 2014); and
· Sharing Hidden Know-How: How Managers Solve Thorny Problems with the Knowledge Jam (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, April 2011).
Kate has also delivered webinars on collaborative work and knowledge networks for Projectmanagement.com:
· Sustainably Smarter: How Knowledge Networks Build PM Skills.
· In the Digital Fray, Don’t Just Converse. Collaborate Inclusively.&

In this podcast, Susan Coleman and Ed Hoffman discuss the importance of empowering women in order to create collaborative organization cultures where diversity, creativity, innovation and the easy negotiation of difference can thrive.
Susan Coleman has over 30 years of experience training and facilitating tens of thousands of people around the world in negotiation and collaborative strategies to build common ground as well as empowering women through negotiation. Susan works extensively on developing negotiation and intercultural communication skills, coaching/mediating difficult conversations, providing large group facilitation to groups as large as 1000 to arrive at a shared vision for forward action, and more. Susan hosts The Peacebuilding Podcast: From Conflict to Common Ground – a gathering for today’s most innovative, courageous and inspired practitioners exploring the best strategies and ideas to build common ground across the divides of worldview, gender, culture and difference.

Are you working in an organization where it seems there are lose-lose internal dynamics among managers? If so, why is that and how can you help to change it?
The nature of work today requires collaboration and teaming to drive business outcomes like never before. Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” provides frank advice for organizational leaders, managers and teams tackling tough problems. In this episode of Center Stage, Johanna shares how optimizing individual achievement over that of the team or organization deeply roots lose-lose propositions into organizational culture. Incorporating key concepts and learnings from her books, the Modern Management Made Easy series, she provides practical examples of how organizations are shifting structures and reward systems to create win-win engagements among managers. More importantly, she offers seven principles of modern management aimed at increasing performance, rather than overseeing people and their work. For example, the principle of catch people succeeding flips on its head the traditionally punitive, disciplinary role of management and moves it more toward motivation and recognition.
Johanna also talks about how the impact of subtle change can impact management. She presents examples that illustrate the differences among managers who have a mindset of being “responsible for” versus “responsible to” their teams. She talks about how behaviors, actions and motivations are different for each mindset as well as the impacts of each mindset on individuals and teams.
Having started her career as a software developer, Johanna has also worked as a project manager, program manager, and people manager. Today, as a consultant and trainer/coach, she helps leaders, teams, and organizations create successful teams and projects and manage risk. She has authored more than 18 books on modern management, leading teams, agile and lean program management, portfolio management and related topics. Read more of her blog, articles, and her Pragmatic Manager newsletter on www.jrothman.com.
Chock full of good practices from real-life situations, this Center Stage podcast emphasizes the key role the modern manager can play in helping teams and organizations realize outcomes.