Below is a partial list, containing four of our top Speakers Bureau presenters. Click on the list below to jump to the speaker you are interested in:

• Dave Ulrich
• Jeff DeGraff
• Kim Cameron
• Venkat Ramaswamy

 

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 it 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 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.

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Jeff DeGraff

Clinical Professor of Business Administration

Jeff DeGraff at GE '08	Jeff DeGraff at Visa '06
Jeff DeGraff at GE

 

AREA OF EXPERTISE:

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

SNAPSHOT:

With over twenty years experience in management issues, Jeff is a Professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, teaching MBA and executive education courses; and the Managing Partner of Competing Values Company, a consulting firm that assists leaders in facilitating change, innovation and growth.

Advisor for many Fortune 500 companies, Jeff has created a broad array of widely used tools and methodologies for implementing innovation. 3M, Apple Computer, American Express, GE, Johnson & Johnson, LG, Pfizer, Toyota and Yahoo are a few of his showcase clients.

He has also contributed his expertise in publications such as BusinessWeek, CIO, Leadership Excellence, T+D (Training + Development), Training, and USA Today.

Besides being an in-demand speaker, Jeff is a thought leader at top innovation incubators and think tanks such as the Aspen Institute. His advice is frequently sought after by the investment community on how to pick, manage and harvest winning ideas and successful business enterprises. Jeff has written about innovation in numerous articles and books. He is the coauthor of Creativity at Work: Developing the Right Practices to Make Innovation Happen, (Jossey Bass, 2002), Competing Values Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations (Edward Elgar, 2006) and Leading Innovation: How to Jump Start your Organization's Growth Engine (McGraw-Hill, 2006). Jeff holds a Ph.D. in Educational Technology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Leading Innovation

This is Jeff’s most requested keynote topic. This popular "Innovation 101" session is meant to inspire every employee, at every level, to take ownership of innovation. He debunks accepted innovation myths and misconceptions and provides the simple steps to make innovation work. Jeff shares how to avoid common pitfalls and how to harness the existing corporate culture and competencies to drive innovation and growth.

Jumpstart Innovation

This targeted session is most appropriate for leaders with a key growth project. The focus is on how to rapidly create results while identifying innovation practices that can be repeated in the future. Leaders will learn how to build teams that can support innovative initiatives and quickly launch projects to proof creative concepts.

Making Innovation Work in Your Workplace

This dynamic, interactive session is designed to facilitate a groundswell of innovation support within a company. Strive to knock down the barriers between corporate divisions and unite with a shared vision and commitment to innovation. Setting up new ways of communicating and working, in order to transform an organization, is the goal of this presentation.

Custom Presentations

Jeff’s presentations can be tailored in content and length to the specific needs of your organization, industry, and event themes.

 

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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.

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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.