Community Spotlight: Five Questions with David Morgan
Technology and change advocate David Morgan is one of our key members, contributing dynamic and forward-thinking ideas and project management practices to the Mindhive platform. His 30 years of experience in program management and digital engineering has made him a leader in risk, strategy, operations and troubleshooting. In addition to this skillset, David has a particularly deep interest in virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies.
David is currently the Director and CEO of Morgan Maurer, a leading program and project management supplier across information technology and digital stack. He also plays a key leadership role with VR/AR specialist Jagged Studios.
We managed to catch up with David and asked him to share a little bit about himself, as well as what he is curious about at the moment.
How long have you been a part of the Mindhive community and what was it that excited you to join?
I joined Mindhive around Christmas 2020. The platform was referred to me by a colleague of mine, who had been talking about the platform quite extensively.
What are you curious about?
I’m currently curious about the way executive boards work and the visibility around projects, particularly relating to project failure. This is why I’ve got a discussion on Mindhive about this topic at the moment.
I’ve been involved in organisations at a board level myself, so I have seen both sides as an employee and director. This highlighted the huge gap in behaviour that occurs.
What makes you get up on a Monday morning?
Coffee mostly. However, I think I’m also driven by a sense of purpose for my work, which is why I’m so active in the project space. So that’s what keeps me going during the working week.
Have you ever had a wildcard moment, where you’ve learnt something new from an unusual source?
Yes, I have. A few years ago, I was working in a software company where we developed a product and outlined a specific vision of how it could be used. After writing a value proposition for the product, we sought feedback from a range of people from different industries and backgrounds. However, every person basically rejected our value proposition. Instead, they suggested a completely different proposal for how they believed the product could be used. In the end, this was very helpful and definitely opened up new avenues for us to explore.
What needs changing in the world right now?
From a business management perspective, I think we need to be addressing our acceptance of change. As directors and project managers, we have all read the Management 101 textbook that tells us how to adapt to change. However, we are still very unwilling to accept and deal with it.
This is why I created the discussion on Mindhive about boards and executives’ unwillingness to admit to project failures. Boards are very conservative in nature and tend to inherently reject any change within a company. However, the last 12 months have taught us that we need to embrace it a lot stronger than we have before because it’s inevitable.
Get to know more about Michael by following him on Mindhive.