We share with you a interview published in ‘Strefa’ in which you can learn more about our speaker Antonio Nieto-Rodríguez:
“Antonio, thank you very much for accepting my invitation to the interview. You are the world’s leading champion in project management and strategy implementation. You do a lot in promoting the project management skills around the world, especially within senior management to show it’s crucial to manage projects in the right way. Could you highlight the key moments, key steps in your career which led you to your present position?
It’s a pleasure to be here with PMI Poland which I have very good memories of when I was there a few years ago. I love what you are doing, your team, the volunteers, so thank you for the opportunity to share a bit about my views. To answer your question, the highlights of my career – they were failures and maybe that’s what made me just fight harder to get what I wanted or the message that I wanted to share. I think that one big point or step in my career was when I was working for a very large consulting company and they did not appreciate project management. They thought everybody would do project management. It’s not strategic or something very important for a consulting firm to advise, so they fired me after 10 years. It made me wonder if project management was an area I could develop or focus on or just maybe go to a more traditional career in marketing, sales, finance. I think many of the listeners probably have that wondering – I should stay as a Project Manager or I should move into a more stable and defined career path. That happened in 2005 and I decided that I need to find a way to show senior executives that what they did to me was wrong. Why do they think that project management is tactical, engineering, is about IT but not strategic? I spent a lot of time researching, I went to the banking and it collapsed, so another big failure, but it was a great opportunity to learn about the risks in big projects. I think that was another step in my career and my goal has always been in line with my thinking of improving project management. It is in line with making people aware of the importance of projects and is about influencing senior leaders, academic and business. So, that’s a bit of my career, I worked in finance, banking, consulting, pharma and always around PMOs, portfolio management, project management. It is something that I really enjoy.
You talk a lot about project economy and it seems to have been a real buzzword of recent years. You have even spoken on this phenomenon as the new management paradigm and The Project Revolution. Could you please describe what it means for you and for us? (…)”