Play Now: This episode is sponsored by The Agile PrepCast. Earn 37 PDUs:: Cornelius Fichtner and Neal Whitten This interview with Neal Whitten was recorded at the 2015 PMI Global Congress in Orlando, Florida. We discuss his paper and presentation "Achieving the Elusive Work-Life Balance". Here is the paper's abstract: If you have difficulty in juggling the demands of your job and your non-work life, you’re not alone. Many people feel like their lives are overcommitted and see no relief in sight. Nowadays, work-life balance can seem like an unrealistic objective and can seem more elusive than ever. I have personally wrestled with my own work-life balance issues for most of my adult life, but—as a senior-aged person—I have learned a massive amount of knowledge and, dare I say, wisdom, about the highly important subject of finding a satisfactory harmony across all aspects of life. I have also read the research and musings from many valuable contributors that have opened my eyes even wider on maintaining a healthy work-life balance. My mission here is to sift through the data and present to you meaningful information that can help you to not only better understand your work-life balance, but can also give you ideas that can help you to achieve the integration that is most important to you. Episode Transcript Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner: Hello everyone and welcome back to Management Podcast at www.pm.podcast.com. Once again, we are live here at the 2015 PMI Global Congress in Orlando, Florida, beautiful Disneyworld. And I'm sitting here with Neal Whitten at the PMI booth. Hello, Neal. Neal Whitten:      Hey, how you doing, Cornelius? Cornelius Fichtner:   I'm doing very well. How did your presentation go? You basically just walked out the door right? Neal Whitten:   Oh, they kicked me out. It was practically staying remotely and I'm humbled. So, there's a lot of people that have interest in achieving the elusive work-life balance. Cornelius Fichtner:    Wonderful. That is the topic of your presentation and we're going to get that in just a moment.  But my question that I'm asking everybody and you have twisted it slightly is what do you see in the future of project management? And you said, you know, why don't you ask me what is the future issue in project management that hasn't been addressed yet? What is it?  Neal Whitten:   In my view, there's a big issue that has not been addressed in past years as well. Certainly, isn't been addressed well here today and I think it will be a major issue going to the future. And that is leadership, I think it's very weak. Most PMs don't know what it means to lead. They don't walk into the job. They are business people first and PM second and they don't necessarily understand that. And they are waiting for somebody else to tell them what to do. But they own every problem on that project either directly or indirectly. It's the lack of leadership, the initiative and I think that's where we need to spend more time on. Cornelius Fichtner:   All right. Achieving the elusive work-life balance was the topic of your presentation today. Why this topic? What is interesting about this topic for you? Neal Whitten:   Well, for me, it's an area that I've wrestled with for most of my adult life. When I was younger, I worked for a major company for 23 years. I would easily be called a workaholic. You don't hear that term much anymore. But I was divorced after 17 years, I did not see it coming and I'm not saying that having an imbalance in my work-life balance caused the break up. But let's face it, having a poor work-life balance certainly didn't help any. And this is an area that I talk to literally