Dave Ulrich

Professor of Business Administration

AREA OF EXPERTISE:

Strategy execution, performance management of workforce metrics and HR strategy in organizations

SNAPSHOT:

Dave studies how leaders build organization capabilities of speed, learning, collaboration, talent, and leadership through HR. He has helped shape the HR agenda worldwide and is recognized as a thought leader in HR, leadership, culture, change, and organization design.

NEW! HR as a Competitive Advantage

This session will identify the ways in which companies build competitive advantage through how they manage people. It will show that HR adds value to employees, line managers, customers, and investors and will offer specific tools to create this value. We will review 14 criteria by which to evaluate and improve HR and participants will leave with an action plan for making their HR functions more valuable.

NEW! Organization as a Competitive  Advantage

This session works on two simple premises. First competitiveness is not strategy, but strategy * organization. It is critical to have both a strategy for where we are going and an organization for how we get there. Second, organization is not structure, but capability. Thinking about an organization as a set of capabilities, forces managers to concentrate on how to define the identity of their organization through the eyes of customers and investors. We will do a capability audit then look at specific tools for capabilities of: speed, talent, learning, collaboration, accountability, culture, customer service, and efficiency.

Jeff DeGraff

Clinical Associate Professor of Management Education
Managing Director, Creativity at Work

AREA OF EXPERTISE:

Managing creativity, change, innovation strategy and practices, and organizational competencies.

SNAPSHOT:

Jeff is co-author of the book Creativity at Work: Developing the Right Practices to Make Innovation Happen, and is an internationally acclaimed consultant to hundreds of the world's most prominent firms. He has developed a broad array of widely used change and innovation methodologies and tools, runs a leading innovation center, Innovatrium, and serves as an advisor to think tanks and governments. In collaboration with Bob Quinn, Kim Cameron and Anjan Thakor, Jeff created the Competing Values Framework, an integrated method for stimulating, predicting, managing and harvesting winning investments.

Creativity at Work: Developing the Right Practices to Make Innovation Happen

A breakthrough idea isn't valuable if you can't implement it. In this highly interactive workshop you will discover how to make innovation happen where you work. First, learn how to quickly assess what creativity competencies and culture you will need to create the type of value you desire. Next, learn to jumpstart a team and a creative project. Finally, learn to overcome organizational resistance to your project. Bring a challenge or an opportunity; bring a friend. Come ready to lower your guard and have some fun!

Kim Cameron

Professor of Management and Organization

AREA OF EXPERTISE:

Kim is actively engaged in developing a new field in organizational studies entitled Positive Organizational Scholarship--the examination of extraordinarily positive dynamics in organizations and the factors that unleash the highest in human potential.

SNAPSHOT:

Kim's past research was on organizational effectiveness, downsizing, corporate quality culture and the development of leadership excellence. He has been published in more than 80 articles and seven books, including Coffin Nails and Corporate Strategies, Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture, Organizational Decline, Organizational Effectiveness, Paradox and Transformation and, recently, Positive Organizational Scholarship.

Transformational Leadership and Change

Transformation has become a bit of a fad, with multiple approaches and prescriptions being common. This presentation identifies a tried and true method for dramatic, transformational change in organizations. Practical tools, techniques and evidence are provided, along with in-depth analyses of some highly successful organizational transformations in organizations. Participants leave with a method for leading transformational change in their own organizations.

Enabling Virtuousness in Organizations

Organizational virtuousness has been found to predict the extent to which organizations recover from downsizing, achieve profitability and productivity, and maintain customer and employee loyalty. But the term virtuousness is usually associated with philosophy, religion or dogmatism, rather than business success. This presentation defines virtuousness, how it can be enabled, what its effects are and why a manager or leader should pay attention to it. Practical hints for fostering and enabling organizational virtuousness are provided.

Creating Spectacular Performance at Work: The Role of Positivity

In this presentation, Kim will identify and discuss the proven principles that create levels of performance that exceed most established standards. Research results and examples of spectacular organizational performance are highlighted. Evidence is presented for how and why a positive approach to improvement works, leaving participants with practical tools and guidelines for implementing spectacular performance in their own organizations.

Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture

Culture is frequently the single most important factor that inhibits successful change in organizations--whether mergers and acquisitions, efficiency improvements or transformations. Culture, however, is an amorphous concept that is difficult to identify and define. This presentation provides a clear and measurable way to identify organizational culture and a proven method for how to initiate culture change. Practical tools and methods are supplemented with evidence from research and successful organizational culture changes.

Venkat Ramaswamy

Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow of Electronic Business Professor of Marketing

AREA OF EXPERTISE:

Customer experiences, innovation, communities, networks, technology and strategy.

SNAPSHOT:

Venkat's current research focuses on building infrastructure for consumer-company interactions, technology as enabling experiences, word-of-mouth in consumer communities, experience innovation and exploring new frontiers in co-creation of value. He has co-authored several articles in the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Strategy and Business, Information Week, Optimize and other publications. Venkat is co-author (with C. K. Prahalad) of the book The Future of Competition: Co-creating Unique Value with Customers (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

Strategy: Building New Strategic Capital

The goal of strategy is to connect resources with opportunities. The competitive space has changed dramatically due to discontinuities such as technology/industry convergence, deregulation/privatization, globalization, the Internet, new information and communication technologies, and big emerging sources of both talent and markets. If companies can escape the traditional firm-centric dominant logic of business and product-centered thinking, they can see a whole new world of opportunities with the new "co-creation" frame of reference and the lenses of "customer experiences." They also can leverage an enhanced resource space that includes the competence of customer communities and competencies of other firms. We will discuss how firms can connect the new resource space with the new opportunity space to build new strategic capital.

Value Creation: The New Paradigm of Co-Creation

Customers have greater product variety than ever before, yet they are less satisfied. Managers have more strategic options, yet they deliver less value. These paradoxes suggest value must be jointly created by the consumer and the company. During this presentation, we will discuss the new paradigm of co-creation of value: what it is, why now, its implications for companies and how to get there.