We anchor our executive training with a rigorous, short-term experience designed to create the conditions for organizational excellence. A product of more than a decade of research on building sustainable advantage, the seminar challenges fundamental assumptions about competition and emphasizes practical tools for improving performance.

The seminar also allows managers to explore individual leadership challenges. Change, we believe, happens in an instant, when problems are seen through new frames. Our goal with each engagement is to maximize the number of frame-changing “instants” participants experience. We provide real-time coaching throughout the sessions, and offer individual feedback to participants at the seminar’s close.

Curriculum

Our training team and curriculum are customized to reflect a firm’s particular needs. Planning begins by exploring a client’s goals and includes our analysis of a firm’s positioning and organizational culture. This analysis is supported by internal and external source material and interviews with key managers.

The seminar’s content is typically consumed over two full days, but can be condensed to a half-day overview of the principles of organizational excellence or expanded to four days to include strategic analysis and planning.

The seminar’s content is typically divided into two areas:

The Commitment to Serve (Part 1)

The Commitment to Serve curriculum is focused on grounding an organization’s vision for excellence in a viable business model that can reliably achieve it. It emphasizes creating a system where:

• Excellence is rigorously defined
• Average employees deliver exceptional value
• Customers value producing the excellence they consume
• Premium service is explicitly – and often creatively -- funded

Click here for an overview of the curriculum and a sample agenda.

The Decision to Lead (Part Two)

Our Decision to Lead curriculum helps individuals to lead in environments where excellence is the target output. The experience focuses on surfacing obstacles to performance in the organization’s culture and behavior – particularly inhibitors to improvement and learning -- and helps leaders overcome barriers to impact. It emphasizes creating an environment where:

• Leadership is customized to specific performance goals
• Dynamism drives organizational design, including learning and improvement
• Mental models shaping employee behavior are aligned with strategic choices
• Leaders surface and resolve personal barriers to impact, unlocking organizational performance