One month gone already! Did you blink and miss it? Like me, you’re probably wondering what challenges and opportunities this year – and new decade – will bring to you and your organization. That’s very tough to predict. What’s predictable is that strong personal, team, and organizational leadership will be even more critical to overcoming and capitalizing on our continuing turbulence and constant change.

Most development professionals and organizational leaders agree the “soft” issues of leadership and culture are vital catalysts to peak performance. But knowing isn’t doing. Despite all the talk about leadership, what’s missing is practical and concrete steps that lead to peak performance.

Leading @ the Speed of Change is my most requested keynote presentation and workshop by a long shot. These themes have been central to my books and work over the last few decades. Dealing with change is dealing with life. Effectively changing is about continuous growth and renewal.

Here are a few thought provoking perspectives and research findings on leadership and change:

“If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t actually living.”
– Gail Sheehy, American writer and speaker on our life cycles or “passages”

“The question that faces the strategic decision-maker is not what his organization should do tomorrow. It is: What do we have to do to be ready for an uncertain tomorrow.”
– Peter F. Drucker, author of 39 books and hundreds of articles on leadership, management, and organization effectiveness, widely considered to be the father of “modern management”

“It doesn’t matter what lens we look through – the lens of those that go from good to great, the lens of zero to great in exciting new industries, or the lens of those that prevail in adversity and last 100 years – one lesson stands out: Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, whether you make it onto the Fortune 500, and whether you stay there, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.”
– Jim Collins, Good to Great and co-author of Built to Last,” quoted in “The secret of enduring greatness,” Fortune magazine

“The Six Phases of Change: 1. Not me! 2. Why me? 3. Deal with me! 4. Oh me! 5. Now me! 6. It’s up to me!”
– Luke De Sadeleer & Joseph Sherren, Vitamin C for a Healthy Workplace

“Excellence is about change. We would not have said this in the 1980s or perhaps even in the 1990s. Today it almost goes without saying. Most organizations simply cannot sustain excellent performance unless they are capable of changing.”
– Lawler III, Edward E, and Worley, Christopher G., Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness

“Call it the resilience gap. The world is becoming turbulent faster than organizations are becoming resilient…To thrive in turbulent times, companies must become as efficient at renewal as they are at producing today’s products and services. Renewal must be the natural consequence of an organization’s innate resilience.”
– Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas, “The Quest for Resilience,” Harvard Business Review

“Unceasingly contemplate the generation of all things through change and accustom thyself to the thought that the nature of the universe delights above all in changing the things that exist and making new ones of the same pattern, for everything that exists is the seed of that which shall come out of it.”
– Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor

Practical Leadership Development for Peak Performance webcast (No Charge to Join In)

February 12th – 2:00 – 3:00 (EST) -5:00 GMT

For this 60 minute complimentary webcast, I’ve condensed the key elements of personal growth (leading from the inside out), leading and developing individuals and teams, navigating change, and building organizational flexibility into five main sections:

1. Change Challenges and Choices
2. Keys to Leading Change
3. The High Performance Balance: Managing Things and Leading People
4. Soft Skills, Hard Results: The Power of Emotional Intelligence
5. Timeless Leadership Principles for Enduring Team and Organizational Success

CLICK HERE to get more detailed information about the agenda and to register.

New Coming Events Section on Our Web Site

Our business is almost exclusively customized internal sessions for specific Clients. I’ve typically done very few public events that have open attendance. However, over the next six months I do have a higher level of Canadian presentations and workshops (and the Feb 12th webcast) with open attendance. So we’ve added a Coming Events section to our web site. CLICK HERE to access it.