“Program Management: The Path To Leadership†is about the leadership skills that program managers are exposed to more than almost any other career field. This book is about what program managers themselves are and what they as professionals can be. It is about what these professionals are and do. It is not about the profession itself.
Program managers are among those very few direct contributors who have leadership activities embedded in their daily routine. Program managers are consistently dealing with creating teams with a mission of taking a project from concept to completion. They are given a singular mission with a vision at the end of a definite or indefinite planning horizon. They create a set of tasks that become a tactical path to a strategic target that is the end goal they are assigned. They do this with a collection of people who they may or may not have worked with before who have a set of talents the program manager may only be mildly familiar with. They may be assigned one or many simultaneous projects or programs that may or may not be related to each other. These assignments may span multiple continents and many agencies or divisions within an enterprise. Sometimes multiple enterprises are involved.
All of this makes the professional program manager excellent leadership material if that is the path they wish to follow.