Eight Forces That Will Shape the Future

If you think the speed of change is fast today - it hasn't even started. If you think you have picked up your last article about companies laying off thousands of workers - we haven't even started. The world is reshaping itself at warp speed, but underneath those changes are important and understandable plates that, once understood, provide a template with which to make decisions and gain insight into what seems to be overwhelming challenges. Jim will reveal the key underlying forces shaping the future and in a practical way discuss what they mean for managing organizations and people. Among the forces discussed are: Demographics, Resource Scarcity, Technology, Information Proliferation, Conflict and Economic Integration. You will never look at the world the same way again. You will become more like the basketball player with 15 seconds left in the game who understands that 15 seconds is an eternity and sees the entire court instead of the fan that is yelling and screaming because their sense of time and insight is lost to emotion.

• Five Questions Business Must Answer
• Seven Forces Shaping the Future and How They Will Change Our Personal and Professional Lives
• Creating Strategy in an Event Driven World
• New Geopolitical Realities
• Four Trends That Will Reshape Our Thinking
• How Technology Will Reshape Our Approach to Business
• The Information Age is Over, We Are in the Communication Age

Leadership: "If I Take Away Your Title, Will They Follow You?"

So you think you really know what it takes to be a leader in the information age. You believe that some things are just impossible to do unless you see it happen. You think you really understand how people look at you and how that frames your company's culture. You think people hear your company vision and really understand and see what you are after. If you can answer yes to these questions, you don't need to hear Jim. If, on the other hand, you want to really understand leadership in the modern age, his presentation is for you. You will accomplish something you believed was impossible and come to understand that your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. You will see that today people are substituting belief for knowledge and hope for expectation and that has profound implications for you as a leader.

• From Manager to Leader
• Six Attributes Needed By Leaders in the 21 st Century
• Getting Peak Performance from People
• Strategic Leadership
• Building High Performance Teams
• Why Decision Speed is Everything

Changes in Technology: What and What Does It Mean?

Planning beyond two years in some technology fields can be unwise speculation. Ten-year business plans have been replaced with ten-week plans. We are entering a time that includes greater-than-human technological sophistication and intelligence. Even science fiction writers have mostly abandoned any attempt to portray the hyper accelerated technological world of fifty years hence. The coming intercontinental internet will be built primarily by young programmers and tech support in India, Asia, third-world Europe, Latin America, and other developing economic zones [Iran]. In coming decades, such individuals will outnumber the First World technical support population between five- and ten-to-one. What are the new technological implications of a world dominated by the big three changes in computation, nanotechnology and genetics? Jim will dazzle the audience with insights into the latest "techno-toys" and how they will revolutionize business structures and decision-making.

 

Ethics - Your Opinion or Universal Truths?

It is amazing how conflicted people seem to be over making the "right" decision. What is the "right" decision when it comes to making decisions that are ethical? And how do you know? Jim engages the audience and forces them to make a series of "yes" or "no" decisions, and then challenges them to understand why or why not it is ethical. He uses real life decisions that employees and managers make everyday. For Example: "My boss told me that one of our employees is among several others to be laid off soon, and that I'm not to tell the employee yet or he might tell the whole organization which would soon be in an uproar. Meanwhile, I heard from the employee that he plans to buy braces for his daughter and a new carpet for his house. What should I do?" When the session is over you will have come to know yourself in ways you never thought possible and your embrace of ethics as a guiding principle in your decision making will be all-inclusive.

 

When the Stakes are High: What Business Can Learn From the Military

On September 11, the greatest paradigm shift in the modern era occurred. That event has challenged everything the Army has learned about leadership, change, adaptability, future planning, and organizational transformation. Jim will share how the Army has had to change everything about itself and reinvent itself to fight the war on terrorism as well as futuristic notions of cyber warfare and weapons of mass destruction. The presentation is guaranteed to challenge the very essence of your thinking about your own organization, the future and your sense of your own leadership abilities. If you think you know what is really going on, think again! Jim will challenge every thought you have ever had about leadership, terrorism, and organizational transformation. When the program is over you will not think the same way again.

• The Key Lessons From Operation Iraqi Freedom and Army Transformation
• Making Decisions in an Information and Media Rich Environment
• Developing the Right Kind of Leaders for a New Age
• Transformation means Human Behavior, not just Technology
• The New Network Centric Organization
• Reality vs. Perception
• Effects Based Management - A New Approach in a New World

NEON BUZZ: Building High Performance Teams

Are you focusing on your company's productivity levels? Quality? Leadership skills? Team effectiveness? Overall employee motivation? Organizational design? How about putting people in a room for four hours and having them come out with wings on their heels? Countless numbers of participants have captured that feeling; they've never experienced anything as powerful in effect as Neon Buzz.

In just one day of training, you can and you will improve it all by tapping into the power and potential of your people. Neon Buzz is training dynamite - a business simulation directed at organizational success. Here, participants discover the power of moving to an efficiently-designed, well-led organization that taps into the energy of individual ownership and teamwork.

This powerful training experience:

• Builds commitment to a team structure
• Energizes existing teams
• Demonstrates the power of empowered leadership
• Supports your organization's vision and mission
• Gains commitment to the need for change
• Opens lines of communication and cooperation among departments and units
• A dramatic demonstration of the impact of change, work redesign, shared information and goal-setting
• A fresh approach to analyzing the synergy of an organization, its leaders and its individuals
• An intriguing, hands-on style of learning

The name says it all: Neon Buzz®: Lighting Up Organizational Performance. Neon Buzz is escape-proof. You can't hide because your team is counting on you - every step of the way! Learning occurs moment-to-moment as participants discover things about themselves, surprise themselves and laugh at themselves. Suddenly, they see how "stuck" they were in old habits. But, with Neon Buzz, they never will be again!

 

Managing Personal and Organizational Change

Why is it that organizations want to change and just can't seem to fast enough? Why is it that people want to change their lives and just can't seem to get their fast enough? Why is it that companies and people confuse incremental change with transformation [real deep change]? In our search for meaning and direction, we have a problem. Traditionally, our paradigms, myths, or scripts have told us what to do. They have helped organize our lives. Whenever we follow them, we feel safe. But today, our environment keeps changing. New ways of thinking and behaving are required because change is major in scope, discontinuous with the past and generally irreversible. Change distorts existing patterns of action and involves taking risks. It means surrendering control. Organization and change are not complementary concepts. To organize is to systematize, to make behavior predictable. This initially makes people and organizations more efficient or effective. As time goes on, however, these routine patterns can cause decay and stagnation. Because environments are dynamic and our myths are based in the past, our strategies often fail, and we feel a sense of alienation. In a highly interactive session Jim helps people recreate new paradigms, myths, scripts, and personal and organizational frameworks that enable us to "build the bridge while walking on it".

• Keys to Innovation
• The "Who Moved My Cheese" Metaphor
• When You Change What You Believe, You Change What You Do
• Four Variables that Affect the Ability to be Change Friendly
• Overcoming Slow Death

Understanding Community Power Structures

So you think you understand how decisions are really made in your community? You wonder why decisions you thought would happen - don't. You need to understand where and how your marketplace will grow and more importantly - why. Jim has analyzed the markets of major U.S. cities to include Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and many others for key corporate clients using a unique model that identifies the key community decision makers - many of whom are behind the scenes. That insight has provided him with unusual insights into what happens in communities, why, and what it means for the marketplace. Whether a keynote that outlines these insights or whether you choose to participate in a 2 hour community power simulation that he developed - your insight into how to understand your community and yes - even move into positions of power - will be enhanced in ways you could not have imagined. You will wonder how you could have lived and worked in a place so long and not known what really happens and why.