From Project Managers to Changemakers!
Interview with Pierre Le Manh
President and CEO
Project Management Institute
Interviewed by Yasmina Khelifi
International Correspondent, PM World Journal
Paris, France
This interview was originally conducted in French by Ricardo Naciff, President of PMI France, and Yasmina Khelifi. It was translated and produced here in English.
Introduction to the interviewee
Pierre Le Manh is the President & Chief Executive Officer of PMI (Project Management Institute). As a global executive with a multi-cultural background, Pierre Le Manh brings a proven track record of delivering results and guiding organizations through complex transformations. He is passionate about leading teams in innovating and creating new ways to disseminate specialized knowledge, upskilling and education.
Pierre Le Manh most recently led Galileo Global Education’s expansion project in North America. Galileo is the European leading provider of higher education serving more than 170,000 students across an international network of 54 institutions and high-growth education technology platforms.
Until the end of 2021, he served as Chief Executive Officer North America and Global Deputy CEO at Ipsos, one of the world’s largest data, analytics, and insights companies. Pierre Le Manh played a crucial role in taking Ipsos from a $700 million primarily European-focused organization in 2004 to a $2.5 billion global leader in its industry in 2021, growing to more than 18,000 employees operating in 90 countries.
Earlier in his career, Pierre Le Manh served as CEO of Consodata, a leader in first and third-party consumer data, precision, and digital marketing. He started his career at consulting giant Accenture before serving as CFO of performing arts non-profit Adami, CEO of digital publisher Encyclopaedia Universalis, and CEO of CFL Holding, a family office owning various assets in direct-to-consumer, marketing services, and real estate industries.
Pierre Le Manh was born and raised in France by a Vietnamese father and a French mother. He has lived in several countries before settling in New York City in 2013. He speaks English, French and Italian. He likes traveling the world to visit his very large family and his friends, watching Paris Saint-German soccer games and wandering around Manhattan on his electric scooter. He has two sons who live in Paris and London.
Interview
Q1: Thank you for having accepted the invitation of PMI France to talk with us. What do you do when you’re not working?
Pierre Le Manh (Le Manh): First, I just want to say that I am really happy to do this interview with you – and in French. It’s rare that I do interviews in French. It is very important to me that in the context of the globalization of PMI, we can have non-English speaking chapters that are also powerful, playing a central role in driving in our actions. Therefore, congratulations for what you do at PMI France.
When I’m not working, I usually fly to another place for… work!
On the plane though, sometimes I don’t work. I watch movies or I read. But otherwise, it’s true, I have a fairly busy professional life and so here I am, still working most of the time.
I still do a few things outside of work of course. I have a very large family – not just the PMI family, but my real genetic family! I have a lot of cousins. My father has thirteen brothers and sisters and I have 51 cousins on his side.
My father is Vietnamese so it’s a family that is very spread across the world: in Australia, the United States, Europe and Vietnam. So, of course, it takes me a little time to visit them and to take care of this big family. Obviously, having worked a lot internationally, I also have many friends in many countries, and meeting them when I’m traveling takes a bit of time as well.
I do some volunteering too. In the United States, I am part of a group of businesspeople who help French entrepreneurs set up their businesses in the United States. These include young entrepreneurs seeking to better understand how to operate in the US market and how to structure their companies, so I like to give a bit of my time to help them.
Q2: Let’s now move on to more professional topics. Pierre, as you know, we are in a very tumultuous period on the economic and geopolitical levels and a certain number of new challenges which are in front of us with regard to human resources, raw materials, supply, ecological environmental crisis. How can the PMI help project managers, young professional program managers and decision-makers to face these new challenges?
More…
To read entire interview, click here
How to cite this interview: Khelifi, Y. (2023). From Project Managers to Changemakers! Interview with Pierre Le Manh; PM World Journal, Vol. XII, Issue I, January. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/pmwj125-Jan2023-Khelifi-Interview-with-Pierre-Le-Manh.pdf
About the Interviewer
Yasmina Khelifi
Paris, France
Yasmina Khelifi, PMP, PMI- ACP, PMI-PBA is an experienced project manager in the telecom industry. Along with her 20-year career at Orange S.A. (the large French multinational telecommunications corporation), she sharpened her global leadership skills, delivering projects with major manufacturers and SIM makers. Yasmina strives for building collaborative bridges between people to make international projects successful. She relies on three pillars: project management skills, the languages she speaks, and a passion for sharing knowledge.
She is a PMP certification holder since 2013, a PMI- ACP and PMI-PBA certification holder since 2020. She is an active volunteer member at PMI France and PMI UAE, and a member of PMI Germany Chapter. French-native, she can speak German, English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and she is learning Arabic. Yasmina loves sharing her knowledge and experiences at work, in her volunteers’ activities at PMI, and in projectmanagement.com as a regular blogger. She is also the host and co-founder of the podcast Global Leaders Talk with Yasmina Khelifi to help people in becoming better international leaders.
Yasmina can be contacted at https://yasminakhelifi.com/ or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasminakhelifi-pmp-telecom/
Visit her correspondent profile at https://pmworldlibrary.net/yasmina-khelifi/
