For the latest scheduled events for this program, click here
One of the challenges facing innovators and change agents in any area is simply that of being heard. The mass media creates the illusion of a multiplicity of coherent ideas, while frequently creating nothing more than a cacophony of competing marketing messages. Such messages, however beguiling, cannot produce genuine transformation.
Human beings need to speak and to listen to each other individually and in small groups, to dialogue and to engage with ideas, to absorb and to appropriate not only the content of each message but also its real context, its emotional weight, its personal and social significance. And they then need to be able to build on these ideas with practical and concerted action.
The idea of this series of seminars is to feature business authors, thought leaders, and corporate change agents working in our region to transform organizations, workplaces, and communities in ways that respond to changing opportunities and needs.
These early-morning seminars are offered on corporate campuses, at conference facilities, and at educational institutions in order to reach the broadest possible business audience. Following are some specific topics, speakers, and areas of interest, with dates and locations where these are available.
Corporations, conference centers, and educational organizations can choose from a variety of programs the ones they are interested in hosting and sponsoring, from an evolving series of seminar topics and presenters managed on an ongoing basis by the Center. Participation may be open or by invitation only, at the sponsor's request. The costs of presenting, marketing, and hosting the event may be shared with the Center.
If your organization would like to host or sponsor an event, please call us at 908-581-8418 or send an email to jcloud@cbe-nj.org.
The following represent a number of currently available programs, that may be requested by corporations, conference centers, and educational institutions in Central and Northern New Jersey. Each of these programs is available in the format of a breakfast talk, dialogue, or panel discussion, or in a custom-designed format by the author.
BC-0301
Judith Anderson
Author of The Path to Corporate Nirvana: An Enlightened Approach to Accelerated Productivity (Silver Falls Press, March 2003)
Taking the High Road to the Bottom LineCorporations everywhere are searching for ways to reach new levels of profitability while upholding core values. The Path to Corporate Nirvana details innovative skills that accelerate productivity and raise profitability.
To kick-off the Breakfasts with Champions Series, Business Consultant Judith Anderson offered her thoughts on "taking the high road to the bottom line." Judith is an engaging and thought-provoking innovator who offers a fresh approach to increasing workplace productivity. Participants take away effective new leadership and business relationship skills which they can practice immediately in their work environments. These imaginative and effective skills increase workplace creativity and enthusiasm and enable individuals and teams to set and reach aggressive goals gracefully and easily. Her lively PowerPoint presentation and ability to engender stimulating dialogue inspire and ready audience members to move to the next level of productivity.
With an MS in economics and an MA in spiritual psychology, Ms. Anderson has learned that when these new skills are practiced in the workplace, productivity and peace abound.
- Presented Thursday, March 4, 2004 Raritan Valley Community College.
- View/Download Original Invitation (.pdf)
The format of this event was part presentation, part dialogue, part interaction with the audience &endash; designed to reach the deepest levels of interest in workplace effectiveness and self-understanding. Ms. Anderson has presented her work at a variety of organizations and readings, and shares the perspectives of spiritual psychology on operating in a business environment.
"Work has to do with cornering and controlling conscious life. It attempts concrete goals. It loves the linear and the defined. But the soul finds its existence through a loss of control to those powers greater than human experience."
--David Whyte, The Heart Aroused
"We have a personality (mental and emotional patterns) and a body, but at our essence, we are not our body, mind or emotions. Our essence is where our values lie, where our wisdom lies, where we go to for our creativity, intuition, passion and enthusiasm. Our body and personality, when harnessed effectively, can be used to accomplish much that is good, but we are not our personality.
"Organizations where this is understood 'work' because when our Spirit level is present, there is caring, compassion, delight, joy, grace, ease, understanding, and acceptance and we can create abundance on all levels. Personalities and issues and challenges are present, but we have new tools to manage this 'human' dimension of who we are. When Spirit is present in the workplace we see that we are on the path of learning how to create 'work the way we always wanted it to work,' and that what is happening is 'perfect' for assisting us in learning that."
-- Judith Anderson
BC-0302
Eric Balinski
Author of Value-Based Marketing for Bottom-Line Success : 5 Steps to Creating Customer Value, by J. Nicholas DeBonis, Eric W. Balinski, Philip Allen (McGraw-Hill, December 2002).
Is Your Company Killing Itself?Businesses in their quest to continually improve and differentiate themselves -- noble pursuits -- often emerge with infrastructures that ultimately shrink profit margins, erode their competitiveness and create organizations that work against themselves. If not addressed, this insidious paradox will lead to the demise of even once-great companies.
Much has been written explaining this phenomenon, yet the struggle of many businesses today often has a simpler and more profound explanation. Many companies have lost sight of the value they provide customers and how to do it efficiently. While focusing on capturing growth, making profits, or managing costs, they fail to analyze the way they conduct business both in the front and back office operations. During periods of success, many companies exhibited attitudes and behaviors that confidently propelled the company forward without realizing subtle implications around them.
Eric believes that these attitudes and behaviors actually mask what's really happening inside many companies, that is:
- The growing disconnect with what is or could be important to customers,
- The failure to recognize that the company's purpose & success depends on customers value, and
- The people, processes and costs in the business are not aligned to what customers will pay for.
Thus, many corporations have lost sight of why they are in business: to bring together talent and capital to accomplish something that makes a customer's life better -- the nexus where value is created. If the corporation does this well, they make a profit and can reward all stakeholders, including investors. Yet, too many companies today are working very hard focusing on the wrong things and their results are suffering. Everyone in a corporation, not just the leaders, needs to look in the mirror and realize that the answer for their success will NOT be found on Wall Street, but in figuring out how their business can again make a difference to the lives of their customers first and secondly, re-igniting the passion of all employees to focus on this mission.
The critical question then becomes, how can a business grow and sustain profitability and/or how can a business with poor performance revitalize itself?
Eric's methods were recently featured in the 2003 book, Value Based Marketing for Bottom-Line Success, published by McGraw-Hill and the American Marketing Associations in 2003. Included in the book is the dramatic turnaround of Dow Corning Corporation which faced Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection since 1995 -- brought on by $4.3 billion in lawsuit judgments regarding the safety of breast implants.
- This Seminar is available for Spring 2004
To be successful in today's marketplace, a company must integrate its traditional business functions to provide superior value to targeted customers. This means creating an offering that echoes in the customers' consciousness as a great deal for them. Why? Because the value provided serves customers best interests. In so doing, a business succeeds, attracts new customers, and is able to continually improve the value offered to existing customers.
Balinski argues that successful companies are focused on value-creation, not cost-containment; and that employee satisfaction is created largely by sustainable business success.
"The essence of my talk is: the way we are running our companies today is the root cause behind the lack of performance we are getting or will be getting in the future."
--Eric Balinski
BC-0303
John Sarno
President of the Employers Association of New Jersey
Lessons From WorldCom: How Leadership Failures Caused the Biggest Bankruptcy in HistoryFrom 1999 until 2002, WorldCom, Inc. suffered one of the largest public company accounting frauds in history. As enormous as the fraud was, it was accomplished in a relatively mundane way: more than $9 billion in false or unsupported accounting entries were made on the corporate books in order to achieve the desired results.
The fraud was the result of how WorldCom's executives ran the company. Executive leadership was the source of the culture, as well as much of the pressure, that perpetuated the fraud. Top managers, aided by numerous employees, conspired to commit the fraud. What kind of leadership fostered such a culture?
After 18 months of studying WorldCom and its leadership failures, John Sarno says that the seeds of WorldCom's demise can be found in many organizations.
- Last Presented February 24 at the headquarters of Affinity Federal Credit Union, 73 Mountain View Boulevard, Basking Ridge, NJ
- Sarno's findings were presented first at an Executive Leadership breakfast meeting hosted by Fairleigh Dickinson University on December 19. Over 70 business leaders and academics attended this event.
This seminar is the basis for one of numerous training programs offered by the Employers Association of New Jersey. For more information, please visit www.eanj.org.
John writes: "My intent in the Breakfasts with Champions seminar is to focus on the corporate culture and the leadership that it tends to foster. The real lesson of WorldCom is to identify organizational weaknesses and leadership failures so that they can be avoided, to help empower supervisors to make the right decisions, and to foster autonomy and responsibility throughout the organization.
"This is an area where the law and leadership converge. Unlike the typical ethics/compliance training, my intent is to provide a training session that will both foster happiness and productivity, and at the same reduce corporate liability."
BC-0304
Kenny Moore
KeySpan Corporation
An Alternative Leadership Model for the 21st Century: Keeping your Sanity, Sense of Humor and Soul in the WorkplaceKenny Moore, former monk and present-day business executive, will discuss the changing role of leadership in a turbulent and unforgiving business environment. This interactive, insightful and entertaining session will focus on organizational theory, case studies and various business interventions in a NYC Fortune 500 company. Kenny is the co-author of The CEO and the Monk: One Company's Journey to Profit and Purpose.
The program will address the following business principles:
- The surprising fact that leaders who can manage to "close their mouths and listen" have a better chance of being heard, believed and followed;
- "Managing" change is a self-contradiction, perpetuating the false belief that we could be in charge of making someone else actually change;
- Getting out of the way and letting employees use their God-given talents makes them want to stay and contribute to the bottom-line;
- Rekindling the lost art of "intrinsic" motivation can be fun, inexpensive and rewarding (personally, professionally and commercially);
- Losing your soul to maximize shareholder return hurts the business and prolongs your stay in Purgatory.
- In addition to our schedules, Session Presenters may also list dates of their upcoming public events in this space.
Kenny Moore is co-author of The CEO and the Monk: One Company's Journey to Profit and Purpose, and Corporate Ombudsman and Director of Human Resource for KeySpan Corporation, a NYC Fortune 500 company. He has 20 years experience in leadership development, organizational change and healing the corporate community. He is past-President of the New Jersey Human Resource Planning Group.
BC-0305
Spirit in Business Forum
In The Passionate Organization (1999), James R. Lucas states: "There is a drive today, in people of various ages, cultures, and professions to find the meaning of life, to have relationships based on something unchangeable, and to struggle to do the right thing. Organizations that help people do these things - or, as a minimum, don't place obstacles in the way - will be the ones that will attract and retain the best and the brightest and most enthusiastic in the twenty-first century."
In the wake of 9/11, many people started asking themselves whether they were truly living up to their core values, and whether business could do more as agent of world benefit to alter the divisions of class, religion, and ethnicity that keep up from recognizing our oneness in the human family. What is the role of spirit in business? This panel will discuss this issue, and how it may impact your business now and in the future.
- For more information on the SIB Forum, please click here.
- For the current and upcoming events, click here.
- To join the group, please contact sib@cbe-nj.org. For directions please call 908-696-0010.
BC-0306
The Passionate Enterprise
In The Passionate Organization (1999), James R. Lucas states: "There is a drive today, in people of various ages, cultures, and professions to find the meaning of life, to have relationships based on something unchangeable, and to struggle to do the right thing. Organizations that help people do these things - or, as a minimum, don't place obstacles in the way - will be the ones that will attract and retain the best and the brightest and most enthusiastic in the twenty-first century."
In the wake of 9/11, many people started asking themselves whether they were truly living up to their core values, and whether business could do more as agent of world benefit to alter the divisions of class, religion, and ethnicity that keep us from recognizing our oneness in the human family. What is the role of spirit in business? This panel will discuss this issue, and how it may impact your business now and in the future.
"Most people have jobs that are too small for their spirit." -- Studs Terkel: Working
"The most exciting breakthrough of the 21st century will occur not because of technology, but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human." -- John Naisbitt: Megatrends 2000
"We in the corporate setting tend to believe that we are supposed to check our deepest personal selves -- our inner selves, our soul's development -- at the door of the workplace, at least publicly. This assumption prevents us from bringing some of the most powerful and creative parts of ourselves to our jobs. In corporations, fear, anxiety, a sense of isolation, apathy, and despair are the results of spiritual poverty." --Barbara Shipka
"All the case studies and other research results that have come out about excellence and peak performance confirm that both members and observers of excellent organizations consistently feel the spirit of the organization and the activity, and that this feeling of spirit is an essential part of the meaning and value that members and observers place on that activity." --Peter Vaill: Managing as a Performing Art.
"Whatever else high performance and excellence may be based on, they would seem to have something to do with the quality of spirit …human Spirit, our Spirit, the Spirit of our organization." --Harrison Owen: Spirit: Transformation and Development in Organizations.
Spirituality is the basic desire to find ultimate meaning and purpose in one's life and to live an integrated life. --Mitroff and Denton: A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America
"This book is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying." --Studs Terkel: Working
"I heard a professor from a prominent business school say, Capitalism is not about caring for people. It's about making money." I thought, "Why does it have to be an either/or dilemma. Can't it be both/and?" An employee…told me, 'They (the management) treat the physical plant better than they treat us. We are expendable things.' The valuing of profits over people fosters abuse. Not that profit in itself is wrong. The words of Henry Ford ring true. He wrote, 'Business must be run for profit. But when anyone tries to run a business solely for profit, then also must the business die.' Business dies when it loses it humanistic touch. --Dr. Cedric Johnson, professor and author of four books.
"As we enter the twenty-first century, it is timely, perhaps even critical, that we recall what human beings have understood for a very long time, that working together can be a deep source of life meaning. Anything less is just a job." --Peter Senge, Foreward to A. de Geus, The Living Company, Harvard Business School Press
"This isn't about making people happy nor about struggling up Maslow's pyramid of needs, though happiness and even self-actualization could be reasonable byproducts. It's about man reconnecting with his true nature and purpose -- in the corporation." -- W. Matthew Juechter
Quotes compiled by Ron Bell
BC-0307
Fred Martens
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
You Can Get Over an Addiction but Never a ConvictionFred Martens will address the current "war on drugs" from a unique perspective: the denial of civil rights. Capturing empirical data which clearly proves that people of color are more likely to be targeted, prosecuted and incarcerated for violating drug law, Mr. Martens suggests quite convincingly that this has become America's form of "racial apartheid."
In addition, this event will explore the economic and human costs of drug prohibition, and why business people should get involved in ending this costly and unproductive effort.
Fred believes the "war on drugs" was unnecessary from its inception, and that the war itself has only initiated and expanded criminal activity throughout the world while destroying countless lives (lost to prison or death), corrupted innumerable law enforcement officials, and annually wasted tens of billions of United States taxpayers' dollars. "Drug Prohibition must be ended before we can ever find an answer to this calamity of unintended consequences."
Fred Martens served six years as an undercover narcotics agent in the New Jersey State Police before moving on to become one of their administrators. Retiring after a twenty-year career in their narcotics, organized crime, and intelligence sections, Martens was quickly snapped up as the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission. There Fred was responsible for the investigations into organized crime and public corruption. Martens' last investigation was centered on the then current Attorney General of Pennsylvania (who subsequently pled guilty to a mail fraud indictment and received 14 months in prison). Fred then spent some time as the Director of Loss Control/Corporate Investigations for the Claridge Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, before joining Thacher Associates of New York City, where he is currently engaged in corporate investigations.
A sought after national and international lecturer, Fred has published numerous articles on organized crime and police intelligence; including the text, Police Intelligence in Crime Control (1983). Martens is on the faculty of The College of New Jersey, where he lectures on the issues of terrorism and organized crime. Fred holds two Masters Degrees; one in Sociology from Fordham University the other in Criminal Justice from the City University of New York. His baccalaureate degree is from Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.
Further Proposed Topics and Speakers
Corporate Ethics and the Triple Bottom Line
Jeana Wirtemberg: When It All Comes Together
Regional Disparities, Social Injustice, and Economic Opportunity in Central New Jersey
Prelude to the Sustainability Summit
Niels H. Nielsen:
Princeton Management Consultants Guide To Your New Job
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002Proposed by Bill Foster
Beyond Philanthropy: Win-Win Partnerships
New Leadership Models
Further photos (click for full version where available):
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