Dan Coughlin

ACCELERATE YOUR IMPACT AS A BUSINESS LEADER. Can one person make a real difference in a business? In this highly interactive, high-impact session, Dan Coughlin explains why the answer is a resounding yes. Leadership is influencing how other people think so they make decisions that improve results. He demonstrates practical ways to lead in any size organization. Based on his 3,000 hours of on-site observing and advising of executives in more than 50 industries and on the more than 2,100 executive coaching sessions he has provided, he debunks the traditional myths of leadership and shows how any employee can impact the way other people think and drive better sustainable business results.

Learning Objectives:

• See the enormous impact of value and values.
• Answer the “Four critical leadership questions” and how your answers can sustain high. performance throughout your organization.
• Understand 10 ways to influence how other people think.
• Realize the 10 disastrous leadership approaches that ruin your impact as an influencer.
• How to effectively give candid feedback to employees about poor performances and still maintain a strong working relationship with them.
• How to leverage your strengths and passions as an individual to effectively create greater value for your organization and your customers.
• How to maintain the genuine, daily, and purpose-driven enthusiasm necessary to guide a lasting impact in your organization.
• Retain your ability to choose how to deal with major changes.
• Answer the four questions in “the raise your performance bar process.”

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin’s Leadership Action Guide that will help him or her convert the ideas from this session into a personalized plan of immediate action upon returning to work.

BUILD TEAMWORK THAT WORKS TO WIN. Many business groups are not teams. They’re a collection of silos. Teamwork happens when individuals support one another toward achieving meaningful objectives. This requires focused collaborative effort and open, honest, and respectful communication more than the long term. At the heart of debilitating communication is a lack of respect for other members of the group. Coughlin has worked closely with business teams in more than 50 industries and interviewed more than 800 people to understand what they feel makes their organization effective and ineffective. He has seen the disciplined, selfless attitude necessary to win consistently in a constantly changing marketplace as well as the multiple issues and drama that bubble up from self-centered behaviors that ruin business performances.

Learning Objectives:

• Determine a cause that resonates more than individual rewards.
• Establish who is going to do what when and why that is going to happen.
• Understand how effective collaboration can become the highest form of business acceleration.
• Use the 10 approaches of effective communication that build stronger working relationships.
• Avoid the 10 approaches of ineffective communication that ruin working relationships.
• Clarify your communication needs and meet the communication needs of your team members.
• Know you are unlikely to change at your core, and know it is impossible for you to change anyone else.
• Be aware of and accept your strengths and passions and the strengths and passions of other people.
• Don’t resent differences in other people, leverage them.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin’s Teamwork Action Guide that will help him or her convert the ideas from this session into a personalized plan of immediate action upon returning to work.

INNOVATE TO GENERATE SUSTAINABLE, PROFITABLE GROWTH. A business innovation is the creation of more appropriate value for customers that they will pay for at a profitable margin to the organization. It has to be both: more appropriate value than the customer already has and a profit-generator for your business. One without the other is insufficient. Companies that avoid continuous innovation put themselves at risk of becoming extinct. Coughlin demystifies the process of innovation, making it simple, clear, and practical. He explains how successful business innovators boldly walk away from a lot of good ideas so they can focus on a few great ideas. He addresses the importance of prototyping to save time and money. If you want your organization to propel itself beyond today’s performance level to generate sustainable, profitable growth, this is a must-attend session.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the “five myths of innovation” and why innovation is a necessary daily activity.
• Know the four steps in “the process of innovation” and how the creation of value is based on carefully studying your desired customers.
• See how to search for hot spots of too much value or too little value for your customers in current products and services. A hot spot is the starting point of a new innovation.
• Leverage conversations, observations, experiences, and connections to improve performance.
• Realize the power of iterating and eliminating existing products and services.
• Learn how to master the four phases in “the cycle of innovation” that produce a steady flow of profit-generating ideas for sustained excellence.
• Learn how to find the profit-generating gap between a customer's expectations and desires.
• Learn to schedule thinking and non-thinking time and how they drive innovations month after month.
• Learn how sacrifice accelerates innovation and why “N” and “O” are the most important letters in i-n-n-o-v-a-t-i-o-n.
• Learn how to find organizations that have matching definitions with yours and how they provide a steady stream of ideas for improving your performance.
• Learn to study “centers of excellence” and how to extract useful ideas from them for your organization.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin’s Innovation Action Guide that will help him or her convert the ideas from this session into a personalized plan of immediate action upon returning to work.

FEED YOUR BRAND EVERY DAY. Your organization’s brand is like a person. It needs to be fed intelligently every day in order to stay healthy for long-term success. In this session you will learn practical ways to feed your brand every day to differentiate your organization in the marketplace. A great brand is a magnet that attracts people to you who want to buy from your organization. When your brand is strong, it makes selling exponentially easier. When your brand is weak, it makes selling exponentially harder. Your brand is the value customers think they receive when buying from your organization or potential customers think they will receive if they do buy from your organization. Your brand is not what you want to be. It's what customers and potential customers believe you are right now. Coughlin provides penetrating insights into the “dos” and “don’ts” of building the brand you want. He explains the importance of defining and owning a performance category that matters deeply to customers and will generate the financial outcomes your organization desires. He demonstrates how an obsession with undisciplined experimentation can ruin a brand and destroy the sustainable, profitable growth of an organization.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand 13 brand-feeding approaches you can use today. (Just don’t try to use all of them each day.)
• Establish how to differentiate your organization by answering the question, “Why us?”
• Use “the wagon wheel approach” that guides every spoke in your business into a central hub of value for your customers.
• Realize the long-term financial strength in sustained, value-added relationships.
• Clearly define what your brand is and what it is not.
• See how long it takes to build a brand and why a sustained, consistent effort is critical to success.
• Leverage a brand audit to strengthen decision-making throughout your organization.
• Value the importance of staying true to what got your organization to where it is today and understand why good business leaders are good historians.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin’s Branding Action Guide that will help him or her convert the ideas from this session into a personalized plan of immediate action upon returning to work.    

THE ANY PERSON MINDSET SEMINIAR is a practical, useful, and user-friendly approach for managing yourself, your team, and your organization. It is based on Dan’s core belief that any person can make a significant difference in an organization, but that no one is born with the necessary traits. These are learned thinking traits.

Learning Objectives:

• Greater awareness of personal assets for making a significant difference.
• Enhanced ability to think rationally, maintain positive emotions, and drive better sustainable results.
• Deeper understanding of the need to focus on fewer activities in order to generate a higher quality of work product.
• Better capacity to leverage imagination in creating new value and better methods of value delivery to customers.
• More effective work relationships with a better flow of clear communication.
• Stronger leadership competencies with greater degrees of accountability.
• Ability to choose and communication a clear strategic direction for the organization.
• Strengthen efficiency in the organization and effectiveness of the end results.
• Consistently innovate to create more appropriate value for customers.