In Russia, a Public Event

On 17 November 2012, Tom will be appearing at the World Trade Center in Moscow. We're glad to announce this opportunity for the public in Russia to see Tom. To get further details, in Russian, about the seminar, you can visit the event page here.

Cool Friend #158
George Kohlrieser

New Cool Friend George Kohlrieser is an internationally recognized expert on leadership. He's also an award-winning author, consultant, media commentator, and motivational speaker. Best known, perhaps, for his book Hostage At The Table, he is acclaimed for introducing the hostage metaphor to leadership development. Currently, he is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD, the International Institute for Management Development, in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he directs the High Performance Leadership (HPL) Program. Shelley Dolley spoke to him about his new book, Care to Dare. You can read his Cool Friend interview here, or visit his website, georgekohlrieser.com, for more information.

You Matter To Me

Tom's newest ebook is now available! You Matter to Me is a very visual adaptation of the piece he wrote called Acknowledgement. We all need to know that the work we're doing is making a difference, and that someone sees that. This isn't about fawning all over the people who work for you or with you. It can be as simple as noticing someone's effort and acknowledging it. Here's how Tom sums it up:

It is to say, simply, that in any context, personal or professional, there is no greater gift to the person or persons with whom you are engaged than heartfelt (as well as headfelt) acknowledgement of their contributions and fundamental human worth; moreover, said acknowledgement almost invariably leads to greater commitment and better-served clientele and a happier bottom line.

MOAP #23
The Final Section

The final addition to Tom's "Mother of All Presentations" (MOAP) is available now at ExcellenceNow.com. You can download it as a PowerPoint or a PDF. Section 23 is a collection of classic presentations that join together Tom's work with a wide variety of focus.

We've been releasing a new section of MOAP every other week throughout 2012. We hope you've enjoyed each installment. Feel free to use and share the presentations. As Tom would say, "'steal' all you want!"

Join The Mash-Up Revolution

[Our guest blogger today is Ian Sanders, marketer, writer, and idea communicator.—CM]

Glancing down my LinkedIn connections this morning, I was reminded how meaningless job titles have become in a world where so many of us have gone multidimensional: how can you communicate multiplicity in a singular title? In an increasingly competitive and uncertain job market, communicating our professional talents is more important than ever. Whilst some of my LinkedIn contacts have selected stand-out titles like Change Agent and Risk Taker, the reality is that, for many, a job title doesn't cut it anymore.

[read more]

Award for Excellence in Leadership

Last night, Tom received the Warren Bennis Award for Excellence in Leadership from the Global Institute for Leadership Development. They invited him to speak as part of the award ceremony, and you can see his slides below. Tom has enormous respect for Warren and a passion for Excellence in leadership, so I'm sure his presentation reflects both.

Palm Desert Final
Palm Desert Long

Engaging and Empowering Patients

Tom has been very outspoken about problems with the healthcare industry (a few examples). In August, he spoke at Harvard on a panel called Engaging and Empowering Patients for Quality and Safety, which was part of the Eleventh National Quality Colloquium: The Leading Forum on Patient Safety, Quality Enhancement, and Medical Error Reduction. His fellow panelists were Michael Millenson, author of Demanding Medical Excellence and president of Health Quality Advisors, Rajni Aneja, EVP of the Joslin Diabetes Center, and "e-patient Dave" deBronkart, former cancer patient and patient care activist. (To see the speeches, go to the end of this post for the links.)

All of the panelists are working toward a common goal, well summarized by the title of Millenson's book: Demanding Medical Excellence. Medical Excellence includes reduction of medical errors, greater quality of care, improved communication between patients and healthcare professionals, increased decision making power for patients, as well as the ability to manage their own care. While Excellence is an aspirational word, the current state of the healthcare industry demands more than interest in lofty goals. The statistics on medical errors are not improving, and it is extremely difficult to change the habits and practices of an entire industry. Not to mention the fact that you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn't been frustrated or angered by a healthcare experience whether its their own or their loved one's.

[read more]

Business Ethics and Other Oxymorons

On November 1st, Tom will be joining Nitin Nohria, Dean of the Harvard Business School for a conversation on business ethics, moderated by Donna Carpenter of New Word City. They'll be speaking at a Ford Hall Forum in Boston called Business Ethics and Other Oxymorons. Their conversation will cover a wide range of ethical issues, from morally committing to your business to partnering with others who aren't ethical to teaching ethics to business students. It should be a very entertaining discussion and it's free of charge. So if you're in the Boston area, please join us.

Brooklyn (More or Less)

Tom is presenting an all-day conference in, more or less, Brooklyn today. But that's misleading. He's actually speaking in Breukelen, Netherlands, at a Focus Conference. Breukelen is a few miles outside Amsterdam, and the name Brooklyn, New York, is a bastardization of its Dutch founders' Breukelen.

Focus Conference, Netherlands

MOAP #22

Part 22 of Tom's "Mother of All Presentations" (MOAP) is available now at ExcellenceNow.com. You can download it as a PowerPoint or a PDF. We've been releasing a new section every other week throughout 2012.

The "15H Theory of Everything" concludes in this section with Hsieh—that's Tony Hsieh, the founder and CEO of Zappos. The theme of the presentation is Wow! Use the word in your daily activities. You might even consider putting it in your corporate values statement as Zappos has done.

The Future Shape of Education?

From the earliest days of the Web, it was obvious to many of us that the impact of the internet on education was going to be huge. An early inkling of the tectonic shift that was underway was the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Open Course Ware project. Initiated in 1999, the project provided materials for its first set of undergraduate courses free on the Web in 2002. By November 2011, there were 2,080 MIT undergraduate and graduate level courses available online. MIT's groundbreaking initiative has been followed up by many other academic institutions, and the body of work that has been created is a valuable resource for people all over the world.

This open sharing of intellectual property has moved up to a completely different level with the advent of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Pioneered in 2007 by David Wiley of Utah State University, MOOCs reached a turning point in 2011 when a course on artificial intelligence enrolled a staggering 160,000 participants!

[read more]

MBA in one day

Tom is the featured speaker at a conference titled "MBA in one day," in Niedernhausen, Germany (just outside of Frankfurt). Tom's comment on the title: "Sounds about right to me."

Frankfurt, Final
Frankfurt, Long Version

Thought blocks

#1

Effective Leadership/100% Under Your Control/ "Rank" Irrelevant:

Attitude EXCELLENCE.
Task EXCELLENCE.
Relationship EXCELLENCE.
Learning EXCELLENCE.

When: NOW!
(Every day brings an infinite # of full-fledged leadership opportunities regardless of name, rank, or serial number.)

No.1 Life Decision: The attitude you take into your next conversation/interaction.

#2

"We do no great things, only small things with great love."—Mother Teresa

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble."—Helen Keller

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."—Anne Frank

"Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones."—Churchill

"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts."—Henry David Thoreau

#3

"The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party but they say nothing. And if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them silently away."—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I suppose I've known all along that there was a lot more to life than a professional career, but surgery has been a very demanding mistress, and it has given me a self identity that will be hard to shake."—Ned Cabot, upon retirement from his medical career, and who died in a boating accident in the North Sea in September 2012

"Living alone has also made me much, much more conscious of inconsequential things, the sweet banalities of a day in a life. I feel now as if I spent most of my previous time on earth in a state of perpetually frenzied obliviousness, intent on executing all the Important Tasks at Hand.. The test to take. The application to finish, the man to marry. The job to get, the brief to write, the motion to file, the verdict to appeal, the meeting to schedule, the PowerPoint to prepare. The apartment to buy, the meals to organize, the two miles to run, the sex to have, the kids to get to school and playdates and doctors and volleyball games and SAT tutors and college. The marriage to end. The books to write. I was always good at screening out the noise and focusing exclusively on the signal, which made me successful at school and at work and (more or less) as a parent. Until I lived alone, I was not so good at understanding—really understanding, beyond the obligatory modern lip service to smelling the roses and living in the moment—that the extraneous noise can be lovely. The Buddhists call it mindfulness, a word I sort of hate but an MO I've come to believe in.

"Such as right now, when I put the half-full quart of grapefruit juice back on the refrigerator shelf hastily, and watch the sloshing make the carton swivel and teeter before it rights itself, like a wobbly drunk almost falling and then too firmly planting his feet to stand perfectly still. We deprive ourselves if we ignore all the tiny inconsequential bits and pieces, the flotsam and jetsam of life. Quarks and neutrons and atoms and molecules, the earth, asteroids, stars, the shaft of light angling through the kitchen window right this second, illuminating the slow motion Dance of Ten Thousand Dust Motes; isn't it all flotsam and jetsam?"—from the protagonist in the novel True Believers, by Kurt Anderson