Workshop Facilitator

“I hate the stuff from the smiling, boring, vapid ‘trainers’ who have no ‘been there’ experience or passion.  Your energy really made everything click and I learned a lot about the effects of my own energy from watching you. Your sessions helped me know what to do with feedback I have been getting from my team and make myself more effective.” – India Duncan, ScrumMaster

The Possibilities Toolbox – 12 Keys to Achieving What Seems Impossible, But is Merely Difficult. 

Breakthrough Leadership – Turning Managers into Leaders – Available LIVE via a series of 5 – 10 half-day workshops, or in English in a 14 thirty minute videos promoted in Japan through Kenichi Ohmae‘s and ALC Education’s Broadband Learning Initiative. For an Overview of the video program CLICK HERE

“Giving and Receiving Feedback” Learning Lab  For more details about the curriculum of this program CLICK HERE

People Leadership and Business Management for Technical Professionals – Face to Face in a Digital World: The Human Connection (a.k.a. the touchy feely stuff!) A workshop series for people who need to move from technical individual contributor roles to leading people and managing a business. CLICK HERE

Creativity & Innovation – Introduction to Applied Design Thinking. This 3 day intensive workshop demystifies this powerful approach to predictable and repeatable innovation. For an Overview of Design Thinking (Part 1) CLICK HERE and for an Overview of Design Thinking Tools (Part 2) CLICK HERE

Facilitating the Adult Learning Experience -Engaging People in Ways that Transform Behavior and Results. CLICK HERE

Intensive Global Leadership & Business Management Programs that global Japanese businesses are hiring Kimberly and her team to facilitate. CLICK HERE

Silicon Valley Innovation Mindset – A Prerequisite for a Successful Life in Today’s Global World. CLICK HERE

Scrappy Project Management – The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces. Based on Kimberly’s book by this name, enjoy anything from a 1 hour “rant” to a 5 day “WorkSHOCK” that will ensure your projects fail for NEW and MORE EXCITING reasons!!  Check out Kimberly’s Scrappy Project Management Promo Video – If you don’t like this video you’re REALLY gonna hate her workshop!

Other Topics – ALWAYS Customized for YOUR Specific Situation

Exploring and Discovering Your Organization’s DNA

Kimberly’s 2 minute video of her “Discovering Your Corporate DNA” Workshop.

Most every kid who has the luxury of getting an education learns the basics of DNA. DNA is what causes a giraffe to have a long neck, kangaroos to have pouches, and porcupines to have quills instead of fur. Tadpoles turn into frogs, not butterflies, because of their DNA. And a lot of behavior has its roots in an organism’s DNA. Birds have wings, but dogs don’t, therefore dogs don’t fly. Snakes, lacking both legs and wings, resort to crawling. But what is the meaning of the DNA of an organization?

Corporate DNA is the historical reason why we behave this way, the genetic code at the root of these behaviors. Like the DNA of birds and snakes, it influences whether our organization will fly or crawl. Although we can change our behaviors radically, our DNA establishes some boundaries. A dog that’s been abused might bark aggressively or bite humans, but it won’t start eating worms, tweeting, or building a nest out of twigs.

If you want to discover your organization’s DNA and use it to unite your team, for cryin’ out loud don’t rush over to your PR department to pick up a stack of those glossy brochures containing the company history and poignant stories of the founders. I know managers who have hundreds of these tree-killers stashed in their office. Giving them out provokes cynicism, and pretty much guarantees they’ll go straight into the recycling bin. Instead engage your people in a personal journey to discovery your organization’s unique identity, and then use that shared identity to create truly engaged employees and a truly cohesive team.

View this 2 minute video about Kimberly’s DNA Workshops.

Our corporate DNA is a doorway, not a prison. The stories we tell influence our beliefs, our thinking, and ultimately our behaviors. Don’t go the way of companies like Enron! Create a  shared story that you and your team will be proud to hear told 50 years from now.

DNA Ambassador Program – A facilitated “DNA Ambassador Program” is available to those who would like to spread their DNA widely throughout their company as a foundation for shared corporate identify, employee engagement and team effectiveness.

“Exceptional Team Effectiveness – A Group is Not A Team”

Men balanced on seesaw over a single man

Highly effective teams can accomplish what would be difficult, or impossible, for one person acting alone. Imagine a single human being building the entire interstate highway system, or writing all of the books in your local library. Impossible!

We must often collaborate with others to accomplish goals that only a group of people can achieve. But a group is not the same as a team, and there are many barriers to fully unleashing “group genius”. Even working with just one other person can be challenging, and the complexity of teamwork rises exponentially. 

An MIT study of global team effectiveness found that only 18% of teams considered themselves successful. The most frequent causes of failure cited were:

• They failed to build trust.
• They failed to overcome communication barriers.
• The goals of the individuals were not aligned with the team goals.
• The team goals were unclear.

Effective teams have a share vision of where they are going and shared values that guide how they behave during the journey. Team members perform best when focused on their strengths. Goals must enjoy the buy-in and support of the entire team. As Patrick Lencioni pointed out in the book “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team”, absence of trust, fear of conflict, avoidance of commitment, lack of accountability and Inattention to results, are five barriers standing between any teams and success.

You’ll leave this workshop equipped to enable your team to overcome these common obstacles, move from effective to extraordinary, and achieve results that would be impossible for those unskilled in unleashing the power of a true team.

Scrappy Project Management – The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces

Kimberly’s Scrappy Project Management Promo Video – If you don’t like this video you’re REALLY gonna hate her workshop!

In spite of oodles of research and years of experience, many projects continue to fail for entirely predictable, avoidable – and quite frankly boring – reasons.  Enough is enough!  Stop managing, and start leading your project teams to the success they deserve.  Fast, Focused and Flexible, this is Agile Project Leadership at it’s very best!

Some of the lively topics we’ll engage in are:

• Priorities – Heart – Lungs – Kidneys!  If Everything’s #1 Then NOTHING Is!
• Stakeholders – Who are these people and what do they want?
• Success Criteria – If you don’t know where you’re going, then any road will do.
• Roles & Responsibilities – Why does it always seem like the problems are caused by “the others”?
• Team Effectiveness – How to Overcome the Most Common Obstacles to Success and Achieve Great Results in Teams
• Communication – Why can’t we just do everything via email? We have REAL work to do!
• Schedules – Most projects are late.  Wishing and hoping are not a strategy.
• Risk? What could possibly go wrong?!
• Lessons Not Learned – Can’t we make new and more exciting mistakes this time? 
• Attitude of Gratitude – Recognition and appreciation practices that actually improve performance.

Topics available individually for every chapter of the book, or get entirely scrappy with the whole enchilada!

Global Leadership

• Becoming a Truly Global Human Being
• Global Leadership for a V.U.C.A. World
• Agile Global Leadership – Fast, Focused and Flexible Organizations that Transcend Hierarchies and Organization Charts
• Growing Your Business Globally – Global Leadership Talent Development Programs
• Global Awareness Quiz Show – Test your team’s awareness of this V.U.C.A. world in which we live with a lively and interactive contest.

Leadership

• Agile Leadership and Management Practices for a V.U.C.A World
• Catalytic Mechanisms – Effortless Ways to Change Behavior for the Better
• Leading from Any Chair in the Organization – Leadership is NOT Position or Title
• Results-driven Leadership for People Who Must Make the Impossible Happen!
• Transformational Leadership – Leading Change in Teams and Organizations
• Conversations for Breakthrough Leadership
• Project Leadership and Communication
• How to Get Out of Your Own Way: Leadership and Communication for Breakthrough Results
• How to Get Out of Your Own Way: Optimism as a Strategy
• Leading From the Inside Out – Know Yourself as the Foundation for Leading Others

Agile Teams and Employee Engagement

• • The Team Collaboration Toolbox

• • Accelerated Team Development for Breakthrough Results

• • Thriving in a V.U.C.A. World – Fast, Focused, Flexible Teams

• • Leading from Any Chair – Leadership is Not Position or Title

• • Agile Teams for Breakthrough Results

• • Transforming a Group of People into a Real Team

• • Employee Engagement Through Self-directed Teams and Distributed Power

• The Engaged Ecosystem – Creating a Work Environment Where Everyone Contributes Their Highest and Best

Creativity & Innovation

• Collaborative Innovation
• Business Creativity and Innovation in a Web 2.0 World
• Fostering Creativity and Innovation in the Work Environment
• Diversity and Innovation as a Competitive Advantage
• Creating Your Entrepreneurial Vision
• The Possibilities Toolbox

Japan

• Japanese Global Businesses – What Can the US Learn from the World’s #3 Biggest Economy

Product Development

• Timeline Risk Analysis for Predictable Schedules and Repeatable Results
• How to Build the Right Product – Faster, Better, with Fewer Resources
• Building Product Life Cycle (PLC) Excellence
• Execution with Excellence – “Scrappy Project Management” for Achieving Results Predictably and Repeatedly

Women in Business

• Scrappy Women in Business – Living Proof That Bending the Rules Isn’t Breaking the Law
• He Said, She Said – We’re Living on the Same Planet, but in 2 Different Worlds!

Communication

• Negotiation Would be Easy If We Only Realized We Were Doing It
• Nobody Ever Told Me I’d Have to Be a Sales Person, Too!
• The Art of Conversation – 7 Simple Ways to Start a Conversation w/Anyone

Facilitation

• Facilitating the Adult Learning Experience – Engaging People in Ways that Transform Behavior & Results

Even More Thrilling Details . . .

Results-driven Leadership for People Who Must Make the Impossible Happen!

Leadership is not a position in an organization chart or a title on a business card. Leadership is a way of  thinking, behaving, and communicating. The fastest and easiest way to contribute as a leader from any chair is to prevent the most common causes of failure: unclear goals, unclear communication and unclear priorities.

The #1 reason that teams fail to achieve their

goals is that they either don’t have goals, or goals are unclear. Teams that don’t have a clear view of the path forward slow down, like cars driving in heavy fog on a dark night. Keeping headlights shining out far enough ahead to optimize the productivity of the team depends on being able to grasp and communicate the big picture of what defines success to the entire team.

The #2 reason that teams fail to achieve their goals in unclear communication. There are plenty of challenges in communicating among human beings. When the stakes are high and people care about their work communication can become even more challenging. This workshops will equip you with effective communication skills to take on those crucial conversations.

The #3 cause of failure to achieve goals, clear prioritization, is key to success in an environment where resources are scarce, typical of most profitable ventures.

But none of this will help further the business goals if project success is not aligned with business success. Leaders must keep one eye on their work and the other on the business goals, assuring the success of their work is highly correlated with the success of the business. This workshop will enable participants to A.C.T. like a leader regardless of position or title through their actions, communication and thinking.

Knowing how is not enough! Change in mindset, communication and behavior is required. Don’t wait to be the CEO! You can lead from any chair starting today.

“Exceptional Team Effectiveness – A Group is Not A Team”

Highly effective teams can accomplish what would be difficult, or impossible, for one person acting alone. Imagine a single human being building the entire interstate highway system, or writing all of the books in your local library. Impossible!

We must often collaborate with others to accomplish goals that only a group of people can achieve. But a group is not the same as a team, and there are many barriers to fully unleashing “group genius”. Even working with just one other person can be challenging, and the complexity of teamwork rises exponentially.

An MIT study of global team effectiveness found that only 18% of teams considered themselves successful. The most frequent causes of failure cited were:

• They failed to build trust.
• They failed to overcome communication barriers.
• The goals of the individuals were not aligned with the team goals.
• The team goals were unclear.

Effective teams have a share vision of where they are going and shared values that guide how they behave during the journey. Team members perform best when focused on their strengths. Goals must enjoy the buy-in and support of the entire team. As Patrick Lencioni pointed out in the book “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team”, absence of trust, fear of conflict, avoidance of commitment, lack of accountability and Inattention to results, are five barriers standing between any teams and success.

You’ll leave this workshop equipped to enable your team to overcome these common obstacles, move from effective to extraordinary, and achieve results that would be impossible for those unskilled in unleashing the power of a true team.

Conversations for Breakthrough Leadership

Effective leadership requires effective communication on three levels: 1) the self, 2) one-on-one, and 3) at the team level. Leading is often about creating a space for others to achieve their greatest potential. By listening generously to others leaders create a “thinking partnership” with their people. Based on Nancy Kline’s work in “Time to Think”, the effectiveness of this approach to leadership and transformation has been demonstrated at British Telecom and elsewhere in the corporate world. The resulting “conversations for possibility” are a tried and true method for generating breakthroughs reliably and consistently in teams. You will leave this workshop with fresh insights into yourself as a leader, and powerful tools that you can immediately apply to increase your leadership effectiveness in conversing at a breakthrough level. UC Santa Cruz Extension’s Management Institute for Leadership Excellence jumpstart program, October 2003, NTT DoCoMo, Jan. 2004.

Transformational Leadership – Leading Change in Teams and Organizations

Goal: Develop effective global leaders

Description: Transformational leadership is about leading high-impact change, often in widely dispersed and diverse organizations. The typical reaction to change is resistance, and yet resistance is part of the process of acceptance and transformation. Leaders must embrace and include resistance even as they continue to take a strong stand for necessary changes that will enable their organizations to survive and thrive. Truly exceptional leaders are able to attract, rather than direct, followers to work together to achieve what one person could not have accomplished, enabling themselves and others to overcome the fear of failure and embrace powerful new possibilities. The 21st century is the age of influence and persuasion. Followers are no longer content to accept direction in a command and control environment.

Key Learnings

– The Language of Leadership and Transformation
– Influence and Persuasion Skills for Leaders
– The Power of Shared Values, Purpose, Vision and Mission to Transform
– Leadership and Team Dynamics
– The Leader’s Role in Building Trust in Teams
– Transformational Leadership – Committing to Your Greatest Potential

How to Get Out of Your Own Way: Optimism as a Strategy

Perception is reality, but sometimes our perception can be more of a choice than we imagine. Learn to powerfully reframe situations and events to increase your professional and personal effectiveness. This lively and engaging workshop incorporates techniques of improvisation, role play and other methods of creativity and breakthrough thinking to explore alternative interpretations of challenging situations. Invited speaker, TEC, June 2005, VP of Engineering Community of Practice, April 2005, COO Connection, Feb. 2005, Silicon Valley Association of Start-up Entrepreneurs (SVASE), Nov. 2004, “LifePartner Quest”, a San Jose relationship coaching service firm, April 1999 and August 1999. Invited speaker, CA State EDD, PenNet professionals network, April 2001. Presented at the Career Action Center in Nov. 2001 and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), Mid-peninsula chapter, April 2002, Commonwealth Club of San Jose Career Forum, Aug. 2002. Presented as a consulting workshop for over 100 professional support personnel at Chiron Corporation, October, 2002. SWE presentation October 2003.

Practical Leadership and Management Practices that Improve Business Results
What is Leadership?  What is Management?  Both are important, but there’s usually a lot more management than leadership in our teams, departments and organizations. Leadership is not a position in an organization chart or a title on a business card.  It is a way of thinking, communicating and acting.  And leadership skills can be learned and improved.

“Leading from Any Chair – Leadership is Not Your Position or Title”

Leadership is not a position in an organization chart or a title on a business card. It’s a way of thinking, behaving, and communicating that enables a group of people to perform as a truly effective team. The fastest and easiest way to contribute as a leader is to prevent the most widespread causes of failure, which include unclear goals, unclear communication, and unclear priorities.

All around the World there are intelligent, well-educated, experienced professionals who are failing for these totally predictable and avoidable causes of failure. Primarily this is a result of:

•       Fear of Failure.

•       Aversion to Planning.

•       Learned Helplessness.

•       Assuming that their goals are “impossible”.

Whose job is it to assure that a team has clear goals, clear communication, and clear priorities? The leader’s, of course! Commit to A.C.T. like a leader, regardless of position or title, through your Actions, Communication and Thinking. Come with curiosity and leave with:

•     a commitment to a change in your mindset, communication and behavior.

•     a determination NOT to wait ‘til you’re the president to lead.

•     a conviction that – without action – “knowing how” is not enough to change results.

You will leave this workshop able “lead from any chair” with practical approaches proven effective for individual contributors through senior executives.

Recovering from the Lost Decade – What’s Working in Japan that can Transform American Business?

What’s keeping Japanese companies at the top of the auto industry while US companies wither? Mazda and Isuzu know. How are Japanese businesses dealing with changing generational values and styles? Daiichi Sankyo Pharmaceuticals and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries know. What’s making it possible to evolve from being a multi-national company to a truly global company? Kuraray and Dow Corning Toray know. Japanese businesses have a long history of embracing change, even radical and disruptive change, when required. Well, there’s nothing more radical or more disruptive than the breakthrough leadership workshops Kimberly Wiefling facilitates. For the past 5 years Kimberly Wiefling has been engaged in a quest to transform the Japanese economy through shifting the mindset of Japanese business leaders. Her highly interactive and energizing Global Leadership and Management Development Programs have been embraced by multi-national companies committed to becoming truly global, such as Daiichi Sankyo Pharmaceuticals, Mazda, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Dow Corning Toray, Kuraray, Yanmar, Tokyo Electron and Isuzu. Even though every cultural expert she consulted warned her that her methods would never work in such a conservative business culture, her team’s programs have been enthusiastically embraced by executives and high-potential leaders in companies throughout Japan, and by their European, Asian and American colleagues around the world. Feel lucky? Then just wait for the situation to change in your favor. Want to grow leaders in your organization who step up, take responsibility, and create possibility in any environment? Learn what Kimberly and her team are teaching Japanese companies that can enable your business to stop being a victim of circumstance.

Catalytic Mechanisms – Effortless Ways to Change Behavior for the Better

There is no CEO in a flock of birds and there’s no bird organization chart! And yet hundreds of birds fly together in complex patterns. Complex outcomes need not be the result of complicated processes, or tight-fisted control. Catalytic mechanisms, devices, processes, policies, or structures that encourage, evoke, or even force a desired behavior, work far better. Explore how to apply this intriguing concept in your organization to make positive changes easily, permanently, and nearly effortlessly.

For years I’ve been fascinated by something that Jim Collins labeled “catalytic mechanisms” in a 1999 Harvard Business Review article.  The article, entitled “Turning Goals Into Results:  The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms”, described how to powerfully influence people in organizations to change their behavior – easily, permanently, and nearly effortlessly.  A Volkswagen campaign called “Thefuntheory.com” rekindled my interest in the topic with their website dedicated to finding fun ways to change people’s behavior for the better, so I reread the HBR article and started pondering how this approach might be useful in influencing behavior on project teams.  I’m excited to share this with you so we can exchange ideas and all get busy transforming the planet for the better.  In chemistry, a catalyst is something that causes or accelerates activity without being consumed by that activity.

A catalytic mechanism is a device, process, policy or structure that encourages, evokes, or even forces, a desired behavior.  A simple example is an entrance gate at a parking garage.  The gate won’t let you drive into the garage until you take the parking ticket.  Although you could get a buddy to manually force the gate up, or boldly crash through the gate, it’s much easier to just take the ticket, and it’ll make your exit far simpler as well.  This is an important point about catalytic mechanisms – they make the desired behavior far easier than the undesirable behavior, in this case driving into the parking garage without remembering to take your parking ticket.  Explore how to apply this intriguing concept in your organization to make positive changes almost effortless.

Key Learnings

– Catalytic Mechanisms
– Emergent Behavior
– Examples in the Real World
– Applications to Achieve Results

Business Creativity and Innovation in a Web 2.0 World

Although almost nobody agrees on what Web 2.0 is, everyone seems to agree that it promises breakthroughs in creativity and innovation enabled by “the borderless world” of the internet, a name made famous by the book by Kenichi Ohmae. Web 2.0 companies like MySpace, YouTube, Skype, PayPal and Wikipedia are putting sharing and collaboration tools in the hands of the 1% of humans on the planet who own a PC connected to the internet, and anyone else who has access to one. The 2008 Webware 100 winners list http://news.cnet.com/html/ww/100/2008/winners.html makes it clear that businesses must put on-line strategies at the center of their thinking.

The norms that defined 20th Century business practices don’t always map to this new terrain. Very few business people have studied innovation, creativity and collaboration, but now these are the basics for interacting in the Web 2.0 landscape. How can businesses plug into this creative new virtual world? This highly interactive and engaging workshop will dramatically increase your ability to engage and thrive in the tsunami of web-centered business activity building in the Web 2.0 world.

Key Learnings

• – Creativity – If you can’t do it in person, you can’t do it online
• – Embracing mistakes and failure as stepping stones to success
• – Listening – the key to the doorway of collaboration
• – The power of many – tapping the group genius to achieve seemingly impossible goals
• – Fostering a business environment that nurtures creativity and innovation

How to Get Out of Your Own Way – Leadership and Communication for Breakthrough Results

Goal: Enable participants to identify and leverage their leadership strengths to significantly improve the results that they are capable of achieving.

Description: Even innovation and technical excellence will only get you so far. In the end, it is the people who make an organization successful. Most failures can be traced to preventable and avoidable pitfalls. The top reasons that people fail to achieve their goals is that they don’t know what their goals are, and communication is poor, especially listening. Competent leaders understand and avoid these predictable causes of failure.

An effective leader must possess subject matter knowledge, process knowledge, strong interpersonal communication skills, and a willingness to lead courageously in this era of rapid change. This kind of leadership starts within. This workshop will enable participants to identify and leverage their leadership strengths in order to enable themselves and other to achieve possibilities that, in the past, may have seemed nearly impossible.

Key Learnings

• – Leadership and Management – Are They Different?
• – The Leadership Challenge
• – Leading the Self and One-on-One
• – Communication for Breakthrough Leadership
• – The Power to Achieve “Impossible” Goals

Heart – Lungs – Kidneys!  If Everything’s #1 Then NOTHING Is!

Goal: Equip you with new insights on prioritization and a commitment to spending your resources where it matters most

Description: Have too much to do?  Working on too many projects at once?  If you’re a typical project manager, the answer is “Absolutely!”  Setting priorities, and allocating your precious time in alignment with those priorities, is a survival skill.  This is common sense, and proven to more than double your productivity over frenetic multi-tasking, and yet it’s anything but common practice.

People get addicted to the adrenaline rush of being “busy”, even if they are steaming along full speed ahead in the wrong direction.  And certain work environments feed that addiction by rewarding activity instead of progress.  Ask most managers to help you prioritize your 11 current projects and they’ll look at you with child-like simplicity and say “They’re all #1.”  Hogwash!  The book “Developing Products in Half the Time” by Preston Smith and Don Reinerstein have some positively terrifying graphs illustrating how misguided this philosophy is.  And yet oodles of people are operating at less than 50% productivity because they continue to operate under the illusion that being busy means they’re productive.  Kimberly contends that the biggest obstacle standing in the way of prioritization is also the top reason for failure to achieve goals – lack of clear goals.  Come explore your own assumptions and beliefs about prioritization and how they are driving the ways you spend your days.

Key Learnings
– Priority-setting
– Multi-tasking impact
– Working overtime

The Sum Greater than the Parts – Building and Leading Teams that Really Work

Goal: Enable leaders and team members to achieve greater collective intelligence and results through collaboration and teamwork.

Description: Competent and courageous leaders assure that these predictable and avoidable causes of failure don’t undermine their team’s results. Leaders must build teams that possess the strength of diversity, and build an appreciation of that diversity in the team. Team members perform best when focused on their areas of strength. Goals must enjoy the buy-in and support of the team. Leaders must adapt their leadership style to the development stage of a team. This kind of leadership doesn’t happen by accident. It’s common sense, but unfortunately, not common practice.

Absence of trust, fear of conflict, avoidance of commitment, lack of accountability and Inattention to results are the 5 dysfunctions of teams that stand between those teams and their success. Based on Patrick’s Lencioni’s book, we’ll focus on building trust as the foundation for the other 4. This workshop will equip participants with the ability to grow, develop and lead their teams to achieve goals that only a team can achieve, results that may seem highly unlikely or even impossible to those unskilled in unleashing the power of the team.

Key Learnings

• – Identifying Team Member Strengths and Strategies (Using Gallup Strengthfinder, Enneagram, DiSC or others)
• – Leveraging the Power of Diversity in Teams
• – Tuckman Model of Team Development
• – Leading Through the Phases of Team Development
• – Team Dynamics – 5 Dysfunctions Model
• – Trust as the Foundation of Results in Teams
• – Overcoming the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team

Fostering Creativity and Innovation in the Work Environment

Goal: Equip leaders to unleash the creativity of their people, and create an environment that fosters sustainable creativity and innovation.

Description: Many companies that were successful 100 years ago no longer exist. Trapped by their own success, they gradually learn toreduce risk, avoid failure at all costs, and consequently squelch or kill innovation and creativity, making them vulnerable to global competition from new or more aggressive companies that have less to lose. One danger of a very successful strategy can be a company’s inability to recognize and adjust to shifts in the environment. It can be hard to see new possibilities that will allow future success. So too little change can lead to stagnation and lost markets.

Participants will learn to assess the company’s external environment and internal processes as it relates to supporting risk, creativity and innovation. Participants will discover ways to spark creativity and innovation, promote risk taking and thinking differently, and explore novel techniques for promoting innovative thinking in themselves and their organizations. Examples of successful and unsuccessful innovators from a number of different industries will be examined and analyzed.

Key Learnings

• – What is Creativity?
• – Relationship of Creativity to Innovation
• – Barriers to Creativity and Innovation
• – Risk-taking
• – The Role of Mistakes and Failures in Creating Breakthroughs
• – Creative Thinking Tools and Techniques
• – Encouraging Creativity in Yourself and Others
• – Building Environments that Foster Creativity and Innovation

Execution with Excellence – “Scrappy Project Management” for Achieving Results Predictably and Repeatedly

Goal: Turn ideas into results in a predictable and repeatable way.

If “knowing how” were enough we’d all be rich and thin! Crossing the chasm between knowing and doing separates successful businesses

from those who merely have a great plan. Having plan is just the beginning. Seventy percent of leadership strategic failures are due to failure to execute. Turning vision, values and strategy into results is a key responsibility of leaders in your organization. This workshop provides you with a proven and repeatable process for implementing your strategies, initiatives and plans. Learn to motivate employees and earn the support of other stakeholders in order to execute with excellence. Create viable and actionable plans that enlist the support of those who must implement them. Commit to carrying these plans into action in pursuit of breakthrough results that may have initially seemed impossible. Leave with the confidence and resolve required to successfully achieve your breakthrough goals both now and in the future.

This workshop provides you with powerful tools and an effective approach that you can implement immediately to accomplish this daunting responsibility with measurably improved results.

Key Learnings

• Turning Ideas Into Action – A Framework for Executing with Excellence
• Determine the “WHO?”, “WHAT?” and “HOW?” of implementation.
• Identify obstacles to success and create plans to avoid them.
• Improve the speed and effectiveness of your company’s execution.
• Double your chances of success over traditional approaches to management.
• Become a leader in your organization who can smoothly and effectively implement a strategy or transformation throughout your company.
• Have an execution leadership process that combines the best practices of world class companies and consulting firms.
• Overcome resistance to change and turn it into commitment.
• Create a culture that embraces continuous improvement and change.
• Get results, not just activity.

Project Leadership and Communication

Masterful leadership and effective communication skills are absolutely essential to breakthrough business results. In this workshop, you will complete leadership and communication style self-assessments, engage in rich experiential learning, and apply

the concepts learned in your work to gain real-world experience in the techniques presented.

This workshop will enable you to:

Assess your individual leadership and communication styles
Explore the differences between leadership and management
Understand the phases of team development and the implications of these phases for effectiveleadership, and much more.

Highly recommended for anyone in a position of leadership, this workshop will improve your ability to lead people, manage resources, and communicate more effectively in order to achieve the outstanding results you desire. Topics covered include: critical thinking, problem solving, informal negotiations, decision making and conflict management.

Building Product Life Cycle (PLC) Excellence

Product development in today’s fast-changing market can be a tremendous challenge. With cycle times shrinking, there is little room for trial and error, and the pressure to “get it right” the first time can be daunting. In this workshop, participants will learn about established practices, which have proven to deliver the best results.

Having a sensible PLC helps you reduce variability and increases the odds of a team bringing a successful product to market. Statistics on the challenge of the New Product Introduction (NPI) process will be introduced as the motivation for adopting a sensible and flexible product life cycle. Focusing on project leadership, and effective communication strategies, this workshop will also examine the role of the project manager as the critical factor in creating a successful outcome for a product’s life cycle.

Emphasis is placed on real-world applications in support of the Total Customer Satisfaction Program, as well as achieving the corporate goals of:

• Product quality
• Corporate productivity
• Increased profit
• Increased customer responsiveness
• Increased competitiveness
• Clarity of organizational goals

Put an end to hunch-based product development and the tyranny of the urgent by implementing a sensible, flexible product lifecycle that optimizes business results.

Timeline Risk Analysis for Predictable Schedules and Repeatable Results

Do you want measurable results delivered on time? This course focuses on creating accurate and predictable schedules through the use of a proven timeline risk analysis method. This method, which has been proven more effective in generating buy-in from the team and improving the natural tension between stakeholders and the team around the basis of schedule estimates and commitments to milestone dates, creates project schedules that explicitly incorporate risk and uncertainty into the planning process.

Using case studies and engaging exercises, participants will explore vital aspects of project leadership such as the use of:

• Participatory management to build commitment
• Leadership styles
• The influence of organizational cultures and configurations
• Relevant interpersonal skill development
• Project staffing
• The impact of working with distance-separated teams.

Participants will learn valuable skills to:

• Establish clear project goals
• Create challenging, yet achievable, schedules
• Manage risk
• Overcome communication problems
• Report on status
• Manage conflict and agreement.

You don’t have to settle for unrealistic schedules and consistent slips. There is a better way. Explicitly including risk and uncertainty in your schedules makes it possible to anticipate and avoid the most common causes of predictable, yet unanticipated, schedule slips.

Accelerated Team Development for Breakthrough Results

Discovering the secret to team success can be a perplexing process. How well your team works together to solve business challenges on a daily basis determines the difference between profits and losses, success and failure. Especially in today’s high-pressure, competitive business environment, there is nothing more important than figuring out how to work as a TEAM. The question is: just how, exactly, do we transform our groups into productive, high-performance teams that communicate successfully and work together effectively?

In this highly experiential workshop, we will help you discover some of the keys to building effective teamwork. Instead of sitting around and ‘just talking about it’, we’ll send your team off on a challenging ‘treasure hunt’ where you will put the lessons learned into action and try out new tools and knowledge before deciding how to apply them back in the workplace. Team members will walk away with agreements on how to continue the open and honest communication they have developed, forming the foundation for effective teamwork. If just knowing ‘How To’ were enough, we’d all be rich and thin. In this session, we’ll bring the learning alive and guide you towards putting it into action!

Negotiation Would be Easy If We Only Realized We Were Doing It

In their book, “Getting to Yes,” Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Business School Negotiation Project describe negotiation as nothing more than “communicating back and forth for the purpose of reaching a shared decision.” Without communication, there is no negotiation.

The result of a successful negotiation is a wise outcome arrived at efficiently and amicably.

Highlights include the 4 skills of highly effective negotiators:

• Separate the People from the Problem
• Focus on Interests not Positions
• Generate Options for Mutual Gain before Choosing
• Choose Based on Objective Criteria

The three biggest mistakes people make in generating options

• Searching for a single best solution
• Assuming a fixed pie
• Thinking that solving the other person’s problem is THEIR problem

The down-to-earth negotiating wisdom that you will learn in this workshop will significantly increase your chances of getting what you want.

How to Build the Right Product – Faster, Better, with Fewer Resources

Don’t wait until you’re almost done with development to include real customers in your test process. In this workshop, you will learn how to collaborate with customers inexpensively and easily throughout the product lifecycle through the use of automated, web-based, feedback management systems.

You’ll discover how to:

• Turn your customers into part of your virtual development team
• Free up development resources
• Reduce the risk of product failure early in the development process

Replace endless debate about customer opinion with fact-based decisions based on real-world customer feedback. About 50% of products launched fail to meet customers’ expectations, and fully 30% of new product ideas come from customers. Adopting a customer-centric product lifecycles significantly increases your chances of launching a successful product, and can generate a wealth of ideas for the next generation of products.

Nobody Ever Told Me I’d Have to Be a Sales Person, Too!

Are you an entrepreneur or small business owner who avoids the selling part of your business? Is your sales process failing to produce the results you must achieve? Are you committed to improving your bottom line, but you find yourself…

• Struggling with getting people to return your calls no matter what you try?
• Frustrated with the amount of polished presentations that result in the prospect wanting to “think it over?”
• Wasting time and money providing “free consulting,” i.e. demos, quotations, samples, and presentations that fail to generate revenue?
• Losing credibility over forecasts that fail to materialize?

You are not alone. And yes, there is a better, more successful and effective way to sell. This workshop will enable you to overcome your resistance to the selling process, and attract and close more clients with less work. In fact, once you come to understand that the true nature of selling is in helping others solve problems, you will find yourself actually enjoying sales, and having much, much more fun than you ever thought possible!

This workshop is a “must” for entrepreneurs and small business owners who desire success!

The Possibilities Toolbox

What do you believe is truly possible for your life? Whether you are facing a career change, relationship challenge, or just feel stuck, the “Possibilities Toolbox” will give you access to prospects for your life you may not have dreamed possible.

The “Possibilities Toolbox” is a set of 7 easy-to-learn techniques that will enable you to increase your personal effectiveness in order to achieve your goals. You will discover how to remove any self-imposed roadblocks to success, overcome self-limiting assumptions and beliefs, and exceed your own past expectations for themselves.

Critical to one’s success is the ability to make distinctions in language that lead to a more skillful use of speaking and listening when dealing with others. In this workshop, you will learn how to distinguish between:

• Interpretation vs. Fact
• What vs. How in Problem Solving
• Inquiry vs. Advocacy in Listening
• Managing Conversations using Future vs. Past Distinctions
• Intention vs. Desire in Goal Setting
• Behavior/Language/Thought Cycle and Action vs. Feeling
• Commitment vs. Confidence

This workshop will allow you to learn tools that will help you explore the power you have to create extraordinary outcomes in your life with greater ease and grace than you’ve ever imagined.

Creating Your Entrepreneurial Vision

What do you love to do so much that you would pay someone else to let you do it? If you knew that tomorrow you could not fail, what would you put on your drawing board today?

As a solo entrepreneur, your business’ competitive advantage can usually be found by determining where your personal passions intersect with the type of work you enjoy. This class will help you to explore how your personal passions tie into your current business ideas, as well as how your passions might evolve into entirely new ideas to expand your view of what’s possible.

Vision is a powerful force which catalyzes individuals and teams to achieve outcomes that originally seemed daunting or beyond reach. In addition to creating a vivid image of your vision in this workshop, you will experience what it would be like to have achieved that future outcome, explore possible ways of creating that future, and design a written plan to guide you in accomplishing your goal.

Participants will engage in:

• Scenario planning
• Creative visualization
• Goal setting
• Action planning
• Making commitments
• Distinguishing interpretations from facts

Ideally suited for solo entrepreneurs, as well as those who are building a shared team vision, you will leave this workshop filled with new possibilities, and the energy, courage and support you need to act on your vision and create extraordinary outcomes.

The Art of Conversation – 7 Easy Ways to Start a Conversation with Anyone

Have you ever wanted to strike up a conversation but felt at a loss for a simple opening phrase? Or have you ever admired the seemingly, easy way certain people engage others in conversation and wished you could do the same?

Conversing with others does not have to be frightening, difficult, awkward, or painful! In this workshop, you will learn and practice 7 easy ways to open a conversation, and enjoy the experience of a pleasant interchange in a variety of situations. Not comfortable talking? No problem! Listening turns out to be far more powerful than speaking.

Whether you want to expand your networking skills, find your next client or career opportunity, glow at your next job interview, or enlarge your sphere of influence, in this workshop, you will discover how to elegantly invite casual conversation – and enjoy it!

Diversity and Innovation as a Competitive Advantage

Are your greatest contributions and successes behind you or ahead?

Many companies that were successful 100 years ago no longer exist. Trapped by their own success, they gradually learn to reduce risk, avoid failure at all costs, and consequently squelch or kill innovation and creativity. This makes them vulnerable to competition from new or more aggressive companies with less to lose.

A similar hazard faces successful executives, professionals and leaders of every kind. One danger of a very successful strategy is the inability to recognize and adjust to shifts in the environment. It can be hard to see new possibilities that will allow future success, especially when it requires letting go of previously successful strategies that have served so well throughout a career.

Diversity doesn’t just apply to ethnic groups, and innovation doesn’t just apply to products. Learn to apply both to refresh your approach to business and give you a competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive business environment.

You’ll enjoy this engaging and highly interactive session, and leave with strategies to:

• Spark creativity and innovation
• Promote sensible risk-taking and thinking differently
• Inspire and leverage diversity of thought in yourself and others
• Commit fully to what you can uniquely contribute to the business world

NOT for the FAINT of HEART:

Dare to Swear the Shakespearean Way! (G/PG Version)

Think you can’t swear like a sailor? Think again! You could even swear BETTER than a sailor, and with greater positive effects on yourself and others. Join Kimberly and Mia on  this journey to explore cussing from a new and empowering perspective. Attack issues, not people! And enjoy it! Take the shame out of swearing and replace it with fun! Shakespearean insults included! For example:

• Thy tongue out venoms all the worms of Nile.
• Thou art as loathsome as a toad.
• Thine face is not worth sunburning.
• I do desire we may be better strangers.
• Away, you mouldy rogue, away!

BUILD up physically and vocally to full expression in all its many varieties – say the things you think you cannot say ON voice, support self with breath, body and guts.

DISCLAIMER:  We are NOT including or endorsing personal attacks, racial slurs, culturally disrespectful comments, or mean-spirited language. Yes, it’s a fine line, but we are committed to a kinder, gentler kind of cussing, something we call . . .

Swearing is Caring! Swearing is Sharing! Swearing is Daring! CUSS to DELIGHT, NOT FIGHT!

Big WHY:

• Because we have many sources of stress in Our World, and damn few safe, un-damaging outlets for our anxiety and aggression. Let’s share our emotional intensity in nondestructive ways that bring us closer as a species.

Big WHO – Target Audience:

• People who crave stress release through free expression, who enjoy the sheer pleasure of cussing, and who are not offended by bad language (subject to the caveat below).

Big WHAT:

• Facilitated swearing “learning lab” where, offering offence to none, purely in a playful spirit, via a safe and harmless release of stress, anxiety and aggression, we can rant, refresh, reboot, and re-enter our lives with renewed hope, and a strong commitment to a better future.

Testimonials:

MOM SAID I COULD! “I was invited to join in the DARE TO SWEAR workshop by way of my iPad. She had my permission…..she is amazing! I was very much impressed at the entire workshop. I was even able to participate in some of the challenges remotely. Thank you Kimberly for letting me in!” – Shirley Wiefling, Kimberly’s mom from Florida

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