50. Ethics

According to the Project Management Institute, ethics is about making the best possible decisions concerning people, resources and the environment. Every Project Management Professional must sign off on a set of values: Honesty, Responsibility, Respect, and Fairness. But ethics – whether it's business, personal, or abstract – often inhabits a grey area, where neither right nor wrong fully prevails. As Project Managers, we are faced with difficult choices. To satisfy one stakeholder, we may have to short shrift another. The more complex the project, the greater the dilemmas. The good news is, there are tools and resources to help us work through these situations and make sound choices. PMI® is working hard to keep current with the issues we face, and provide up-to-date decision-making guidance.

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About the Speakers

Alan Richter is the president of QED Consulting, a 28-year-old company based in New York City. He works primarily in the areas of leadership, values, culture and change, and is a recognized pioneer in global diversity and international ethics. He has consulted with many global organizations such as NASA, CERN, the UN (including the Secretariat, peacekeeping, etc., and many UN Agencies) as well as leading Global Fortune 500 companies. He has also presented at conferences in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. He is the co-author of the Global Diversity & Inclusion Benchmarks and the Global Ethics & Integrity Benchmarks and the co-creator of the Global Diversity Survey and Global Gender Intelligence Assessment. He recently co-edited a book entitled: An Inquiry into the Existence of Global Values (Hart, 2015). He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from London University, and Masters and undergraduate degrees from the University of Cape Town.

Michael O'Brochta has worked in project management for over thirty years at the CIA, where he led the development of highly complex top secret projects, programs, and systems, and he led a program to mature project management and systems engineering agency-wide. As President of Zozer, Inc,. he helped develop and implement the new government-wide Federal Acquisition Certification for Program and Project Managers. Mr. O'Brochta writes and speaks extensively about project management; his recent book, titled How To Get Executives To Act For Project Success is available on Amazon. Since his recent climb of yet another of the world's seven summits, he has been exploring the relationship between project management and mountain climbing.

Greg Balestrero has been a global advocate for excellence in performance management and business results. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he has been a project engineer, project manager, and for the last 30 years, a senior executive of professional membership associations related to engineering and project management. From 2002 – 2011, Greg served as the President and CEO of Project Management Institute (PMI®). He has met with business and government leaders in more than 60 countries, advocating and promoting a project focus in engineering, construction, and a broad range of business sectors. This exposure has shaped his thinking and message, reinforcing the need that organizations must transform to sustain themselves, integrating the values of community and the planet, with their own corporate strategies and values.