My Services

I provide consulting and advisory services to senior executives, management teams, and company boards through workshops, seminars, one-on-one coaching sessions, and intervention programs. I help both individual executives and organizations. Leadership - Team - Organizational - Business Strategy - Customer Issues - are all tackled using the dimensional leadership model know as Advantage Maker Strategy.

People/Teams We Work With

• Top executives and managers who have a big job, working on high stakes issues for the business and organization.
• You are a leader and a manager.
• You are responsible for leadership, direction, strategy, organization effectiveness and alignment, leveraging people, resolving conflicts, making tough decisions.
• You want to stack the deck in your favor.
• You are an advantage maker and don't want to be at a disadvantage in terms of the organization, people, strategy.
• You must move the organization forward. Being stuck is unacceptable.

The Predicaments, Problems and Pains You Face

Even experienced managers must continuously adapt to the uncertainty they encounter. There is a great deal at stake. In the face of disadvantages you need to be an Advantage-Maker. I commonly advise managers on four types of issues:

1. Needing to do more with less, and do it faster, and having the ingenuity to find hidden assets that will enable you to get the most out of everything you have. You may unknowingly and inadvertently limit your opportunity and upside. Managers know they need to work smarter, not harder, but how? This is true for the organization, the people, and the business.

2. Leadership and management performance issues that are costing you and the organization and putting at risk your ability to win and succeed. Not creating a profitable course of action is a big mistake. This includes:

a. Managers getting negative feedback on their performance. You may be seen as reactive, not strategic. If you continue, you will lose your effectiveness and influence in the organization. Tough decisions may not be fast enough, or you may be having difficulty collaborating, not working well with others, or your group is stagnating, not moving forward.

b. Leaders taking on a high stakes challenge and wanting to be the best you can and win, not lose. You want to have strategic, adaptive, profitable courses of action and not lose momentum. You can get more out of yourself with the right guidance, coaching, and leadership development.

3. Organizational and business alignment issues--wasting time, money, resources, and people assets--that include adapting the organization in the midst of uncertainty and economic difficulties to perform at the required level to succeed. A fragmented, low morale organization with departments competing or not aligned around the most important issues including resource allocation. People not dealing with controversy effectively, may include lack of teamwork, poor collaboration skills, or avoiding conflict.

4. Determining and executing the right strategic direction. Getting everyone onboard to implement that strategy. Having successful off-sites to discuss these high stakes issues at a substantially higher level than usually occurs and skillfully addressing controversy and resolving conflict to achieve agreement or to disagree and commit to action. When you need to structure the organization to move forward and advance faster.

I design and develop advantage-making programs that help organizations, teams, and leaders in multiple industries and business environments. Real-life examples of Advantage Maker Strategy are available online here >>

Getting Results: How You Can Benefit Now

1. Difficult business times are made more difficult when organizations, teams and individual players are not seeing reality accurately. This results in big cost in terms of wrong actions, continued errors, delays, inappropriate use of resource and waste of assets. I place a big focus on seeing reality, not a mystical exercise, but a practical inquiry that leads to profitable, rapid course correction.

This approach has led to significant successes and turned failing or under-performing organizations into profitable business. There was over $4 million dollar upside in revenues because of a simple direct clarifying conflict resolution.

2. Departments can waste resources, financial and people assets, and attempt to operate with a lack of alignment. I'm known for establishing alignment that leads to performance improvements.

There is one thing to say: we should all be pointed in the same direction and quite another thing to actually operate in alignment and on the same page. In one case, major delays were eliminated and time to market was improved by 6 months--enabling the company to take advantage of windows of opportunity they had missed in the past resulting in millions of dollars increased sale.

3. Accelerating performance improvements for individuals, teams, and organizations. By using a proprietary proven methodology for rapid adaptation, we collaborate with you on the high stakes issues to realistically achieve the results they are after. As an example, an executive who was failing became a big winner in the organization.

4. In teams that lack collaboration, we have transformed the environment into a collaborative high performance team. By showing managers how to collaborate on controversial issues in real time they were able to have substantially higher quality strong business dialogues to reach actionable decisions.

This is not 'kumbaya' team building; the focus is on real issues that effect implementation, profits and growth. Aspects of this approach were developed at Harvard Business School.

5. Leaders are, by definition, influential. If you are not as influential as you want or need to be, I help managers become more influential: influencing up, down and laterally.

We employ the behavioral science of influence based upon research that has increased sales 30% as well as increased collaboration dramatically in sticky situations. Rather than empty claims, we have the research studies that support the actions that will be recommended and customized for you and your organization.

6. Judgment under uncertainty is pivotal for executives. Finding the right vantage point to make decisions can be the difference between success and failure. I have helped Presidents develop strategic maneuverability to rapidly move their organization forward.

Learn more about my:
>> book : "The Advantage Makers" published in September 2007 by FT Press
>> services : how I can help you achieve success in your business
>> methodology : how advantage maker strategies work
>> speaking services : keynotes, workshops, and seminars
>> case studies : companies I've helped with advantage making programs

My clients include Fortune 500 firms as well as start-ups, including Wells Fargo, Visa, Citibank, Sun Microsystems, Plantronics, Symantec, Cadence Design Systems, HBO & Co., BEA Systems, Synopsys, NVidia, Pac Bell, Xilinx, Affymax, firstRain, and many more.

For me, “getting leadership right” means acting as an Advantage-Maker.

Learn more about me >>