Jeff designs his programs for keynote addresses, breakout sessions, and half-day workshops.  He can easily expand or combine these programs into full day events, as well as executive retreats and planning sessions.

Audience members often wonder if Jeff is on the company payroll.  They, and you, benefit from his in-depth study of your industry and of the goings-on in your company.  Your group discovers that he knows them and their concerns.  At show time, they receive an insider’s view – from an outsider’s perspective. 

A talented professional, Jeff passes on business and personal “put-it-to-work-right-now” guidance.  Your audience gets timely and timeless examples.  They get challenges that inspire them.  They are readied to deliver what you want.

LEADERSHIP FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION

America’s Most Admired Company – Yours.  What makes a select group of American companies the most respected, influential, and profitable businesses in this land?  How do these companies set themselves apart, steer clear of the peril of “commoditization,” and prevail – regardless of declining prices, squeezed margins, and daunting competition.  In understanding and applying the well-defined attributes of industry leadership these businesses have refined, your company can do much more than supervise and complement your competition.  Instead, your company can stand out as the most esteemed, significant, and winning enterprise in your industry.

Being the “Most Admired,” isn’t about one peerless company, innovation, or financial return.  The bottom line is not about brand coolness, business positioning, or CEO pedigree.  It is about the quantifiable, success-based blueprint – independent of economic cycles or industries – that winning companies follow to produce the accomplishment many esteem and desire to emulate.  When your company stands alone, there’s no need to break from the pack or leave the herd.   

Protect Your Capital at the Capitol – The Corporate Leader’s Role in Building Political Influence.  With the future of your business in the hands of elected leaders, corporate directors, executives, and managers must develop, nurture and uphold political relationships and influence.  The organizations that play a part in the legislative and regulatory process the most will hold the largest role in influencing business policy. 

While lobbyists serve a vital purpose, legislators listen more attentively to local business owners and managers who can make clear the effect a given law may place upon their business.  You, the local executive, have more influence with your lawmaker than a dozen lobbyists.  Your involvement in lawmakers’ understanding of your business is no longer an option – It’s a responsibility.

Your Company, Your Community and Your Competitive Advantage – Corporate Citizenship as Strategy.  There is an emerging new standard in corporate leadership: Values and citizenship.  Interested in more than just a better rate or price, consumers want to know how your company invests in their local community.  With a societal return to local matters, consumers are more prone to buy, invest, and do business with an organization that invests in its own backyard. 

Your company has much to contribute beyond dollars and equipment: It has expertise, coalitions, and the enthusiasm of your employees.  More than just a philanthropic initiative or public relations effort, your company benefits from greater recognition, increased customer loyalty, a stronger brand, and greater political influence.

Building Better Boards – Setting the Standard in Corporate Governance.  Exceptional corporate performance is no longer based only on financial measures, but also gauged on investor, employee, customer and community observations of your leadership practices and full board engagement.  Governance is much more than making decisions to do right or avoid trouble. Governance is about establishing – and maintaining – your company’s reputation and exhibiting the value you create for your organization.

An integral part of your leadership practices, engagement and board dynamics affects your risk management decisions, organizational functioning, market position, and civic perception.  Equally as important, strong ethics establish and strengthen your company’s industry standing.  This solid reputation attracts customers, talent, and investors, leading to increased revenue, higher market share, a more committed workforce, and a premium value for your company. 

LEADERSHIP FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS

Your Customer’s Experience – Will It Win, Wow, or Worry?  The Customer Revolution is in full swing.  A fantastic product or service may bring your customers in the door, but only one factor will bring them back – an outstanding experience.  Every customer touch point offers your company an opportunity to maximize the customer experience and establish a bond that will never be broken.  Strategically managing the customer experience is a business tool that integrates the entire organization in its desire to connect with your customers.   

In dissecting, designing, measuring, and improving your customer’s experience with your product or service, your company can transform its image and brand, making you more essential – more indispensable – to your customer’s life.  In a world where first-rate customer service is the expected norm, it’s time to abandon being just competitive and concentrate on becoming a required, central part of life.

Satisfaction: Worthless; Commitment: Priceless – Developing Loyalty with Your Customers.  Set aside the platitudes of loyalty, customers have a simple list of demands: Give me what I want, when I want it, and reward me for it or I’ll go somewhere else and get it.  In a marketplace that defines all participants as a commodity, it’s time for your company to become an absolute necessity.  Superior customer service and lifelong commitment hinges on: Thorough knowledge about your customers; Managing customers as investments; Rewarding those who choose you most; and, Creating campaigns that increase your customers’ lifetime value to your company.  

Developing customer commitment is much more than conducting satisfaction studies that rarely equal repeat sales or enthusiastic referrals.  Commitment involves a systematic process of: Customer feedback and knowledge-sharing; Rewards and measurable loyalty programs; and, Turning customers into advocates.  Find out precisely what your customers want, use that information to generate effective products and services, and watch your customers keep coming back for more.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive – How Your Customers Will Redesign Your Products, Services, Processes and Business Model.  It’s no secret – the best businesses listen to their customers formally and regularly.  Despite corporate rhetoric, most customers don’t feel at the center of “customer-centric” organizations.  It’s time to get past lip service and on to some passionate action.  Is your customer really King?  Do you really welcome their feedback?  The most progressive companies tackle customer issues together.     

A well-run program comprised of a cross-section of your customer base can easily be your most effective sales and marketing tool allowing you to harness the voice of your customers to their – and your – long-term benefit.  There’s no doubt about it – The process of engaging directly with loyal and passionate customers is a powerful, persuasive marketing weapon.  The results are quantifying the elusive links between satisfaction, loyalty, market share, and profits.
 
Straight Talk about Successful Sales Cultures – How the Best Build, Manage, Grow, and Support Sales-Focused Organizations.  Fact:  You don’t have the luxury of 24 months to build a “sales and service” culture.  Your customers won’t wait.  If you want a corporate culture that supports team sales and takes sales training out of the training room and into practice, then look to the model of some of the greatest successes from small and large firms.  These flat, team-oriented companies create sales leaders – sales cultures – with a go-to-the-market strategy that engages customers and decision-makers in conversations that yield results for both.  Getting the sale is secondary to making sure the customer succeeds.  And it can happen now.
 
Every feature of a complete sales culture strategy – sales force organization, hiring, sales manager selection, training, compensation, technology, goal setting, and performance management – requires sales management to be just as strong as the sales force.  With a straight-forward comprehension of the entire process of recruiting, building, and managing a results-based sales and support team, progressive organizations greatly increase their chances of finding, satisfying, and retaining the best customers. 

LEADERSHIP FOR YOUR TEAM

This Isn’t The Company I Came To Work For – Leading Change, Driving Innovation, Going from Good to Great, and Staying That Way.  Change is here in many forms – new ventures, restructuring, mergers, acquisitions, culture shifts, and more.  Today’s business environment requires an unprecedented degree of innovation and agility, putting exceptional stress on people’s ability to change.  Most change initiatives fail to deliver their promised value.  Why?  Despite careful management of the operational aspects of corporate change, many managers and executives overlook the human element — how changing a job description or corporate environment makes people feel and, in the end, deliver.  

Ultimately, employees are the strength of any company.  Aligning corporate change initiatives with your employees’ inner workings — their emotions and reactions — as well as the needed operational adjustments, increases the success rate of any change.

Building Team Trust – How it Changes Everything.  When leading teams of experienced and established professionals, executives can meet various tests.  One challenge is nurturing and sustaining a well-coordinated, high performance group able to achieve clear business objectives.  Another contest is building the sort of trust that tears down the walls of corporate culture stumbling blocks and turns internal competitors into enterprise-wide colleagues. 

The essential skills for effective trust-building leadership – when taught, absorbed, and applied – make a considerable difference in individual and organizational leadership.  Once implemented, they improve your capability to: Get people to do what really needs to be done; Enrich organizational efficiency; Provide focus and purpose for your organization; and, Construct a purposeful, unified team – one of the few remaining competitive points of differentiation.

Leadership This Way, That Way, and All Ways – Developing Influence Throughout Your Organization.  Most leadership does not occur at the top of an organization.  In reality, leadership comes from the middle and front line – right where your staff and customers expect it most.  In a world of open communication and flat organizations, leadership is no longer top-down: Leadership is up, down, and across organization charts, divisions, and job descriptions.  Leadership must be everywhere. 

With a requirement for dependable leadership in the all-important positions responsible for revealing, implementing, and delivering your company’s vision and mission, leaders must apply their influence upward upon superiors, across to their fellow managers, and down to the team members they supervise.  The shared quality of flourishing companies is the band of able leaders at every level of their organizational structures.  Invest in the leadership promise of your personnel and reap the benefits of skilled management that is quick to respond to change, incessantly improving, and – without fail – delivering results.

Don’t Mess With My Company – Building Engagement, Commitment, and Ownership Throughout Your Organization.  When people become a member of an organization, they are typically eager, loyal, and prepared to be advocates for their employer.  Simply put, they are very engaged.  Then the honeymoon ends and – over time – employees become less engaged.  From that point, what leaders do shapes the path that employees will take – toward sustained engagement or on the way to the ranks of those who by no means commit or who are actively discontented.

To get to the bottom of this challenge, leaders must cultivate engaged employees who help build your business with their ownership way of thinking.  Leaders must build a dedicated workforce of self-leaders.  Self-leaders: Want to understand expectations so they can surpass them; Are unsurprisingly curious about their company and their position in it; Perform at reliably high levels; Use their capacities and strong suits at work every day; Work with zeal; and, Have an intuitive connection with their company.  Move your organization forward with an enterprise full of leaders who think like owners – at every level. 

LEADERSHIP FOR YOUR LIFE

Brand You – Achieving Success and Satisfaction in an Extraordinary Career and Life.  Every day, life presents small opportunities to navigate your course and achieve your greatest desires.  What really separates those who truly get ahead and those who do not?  Hard work, accomplishments, and surviving in a dog-eat-dog world will only get you so far.  Where you are today, and where you will be tomorrow is not a happenstance – It is an upfront result of your choices, reactions, and habits in life.   

A personal brand is more than a good impression, getting noticed, and putting your nose to the grindstone.  A personal brand encompasses your individual integrity, professional presence, communications skills, and leadership abilities.  “Brand You” embraces the unwritten rules of life, the real truths you need to know in order to build the kind of personal brand that shouts “headed for the top” – in and out of the office.  “Brand You” replaces worn-out, ineffective practices with advantageous behaviors that yield spectacular results – Control of your destiny, realization of your ambitions, and a life full of energy and integrity.