Transformational Leadership in Action

Transformational Leadership –
17 Minute Virtual Seminar Shows How

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The Legendary Value Cycle™

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The Legendary Value Cycle™ is based on 3 Phases of Organizational Leadership that systematically turbocharge your business:

Phase 1 – Create Value: Create competitive advantage that’s virtually impossible for your competitors to duplicate

Creating organic growth to satisfy investor expectations is becoming increasingly difficult, given the high failure rate of most new products, mergers, and acquisitions. The Create the Value™ phase helps you revitalize your market position and growth opportunities in uncommon ways, strengthen your foundations for value creation, use market insights to prepare for the future, and build your team so that you can profit from next generation customer needs in ways that are virtually impossible for your competitors to duplicate.

This Phase of the Legendary Value Cycle™ consists of 4 stages that address 4 drivers of stakeholder value. Each stage builds measurable outcomes:

Stage 1.	Create Your Legendary Purpose™ by learning 6 effective approaches for developing a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal (BHAG) that inspires your entire organization and relentlessly keeps it on track (often easier said than done!) Defining your Legendary Purpose™ is the foundation for the Strategy Alignment Pyramid™ which will transform your leadership and your business.
Stage 2.	Create Your InValuAble™ Team by using these 2 uncommon secrets to separate your donkeys from your racehorses, but even more important, to deal with those “marginal employees in the middle” who tend to be the most problematic to resolve. When you build a strong corporate team, implementing the rest of the Cycle accelerates
Stage 3.	Create Your Competitive Advantage and uncover new revenue potential and sustainable market advantages by exploring four low-risk, low-cost, surprisingly-easy-to-implement differentiation strategies in ways that are hard to copy, often overlooked by even top business leaders.
Stage 4.	Create Early-Warning Metrics to Proactively Manage Results by understanding your unique business drivers and then identifying leading indicators that help you adapt and adjust to changing conditions proactively, rather than reactively when its too late to change your results. Developing your dashboard is one of the most valuable actions you can take to transform the way your business achieves results.

Roughly 1 in 10 companies can sustain the kind of growth that translates into above-average shareholder returns over more than a few years… yet there are at least 16 low-cost, low-risk approaches for achieving growth that are overlooked by most leaders.

Proof: in 1955 the first Fortune 500 list was published. As of 2010, only 62 of the original companies are still on the list, they’re the Legends we’re all familiar with. A total of 1952 have come and gone. Some that disappeared became small caps; others disappeared in mergers; many just faded away. Is that YOUR future?

Phase 2 – Build Value Capital: “Get it right the first time” and develop a renewable process for growth, while reducing costs.

Have you ever noticed how often different areas of your firm are pulling in different directions? How many times do you have to use your precious time to get the companies you deal with in your personal and professional life to fix something that they’ve gotten wrong? Your customers are likely experiencing the same thing, because despite years of focusing on TQM, Six Sigma, and Customer Service training, its becoming more and more rare that things are done right the first time.

The Build the Value Capital™ phase of the Legendary Value Cycle™ consists of 3 stages that address the organization’s ability to deliver on its commitments and strip unnecessary service costs right out of your business for good.

Stage 5.	Build Your Get it Right the First Time” Culture by tackling wasted time and effort in 4 unusual ways to increase morale, productivity, and efficiency while stripping out internal frustrations and excess service costs. Most business process re-engineering is complex and time consuming; by focusing on just a few key-but-often-overlooked challenges, you’ll see impact and ROI almost immediately.
Stage 6.	Build Engagement for Employee Retention using these overlooked opportunities to eliminate many of your time-consuming HR issues around employee communication, motivation, and incentives, while generating cost savings from reduced employee turnover and greater effectiveness. If your managers typically dread doing Employee Evaluation and Assessment reviews, they will love this approach.
Stage 7.	Build Alignment to Value with simple, practical, yet uncommon approaches that increase employee clarity and commitment, and strip the high costs of non-constructive competing internal behaviors right out of your system. This goes well beyond traditional leadership theories of alignment and will transform the way your employees define their roles and their responsibilities for leveraging their skills and talents to achieve results.

14% of lost customers leave in frustration because of just one shortcoming in your firm… that you could fix within days.

68% of lost customers leave NOT because of price or quality, but due to one insidious issue that you need to address… before an employee’s first day on the job.

70% of calls to call centers are as a result of the supplier’s own failures… and just 5 easy-to-fix categories of failure cause 80% of your service problems and costs.

There’s one uncommon service secret that can reduce your costs by 20-50%.

Phase 3 – Capture The Value: Generate bottom-line financial results by leveraging authentic and earned loyalty into Legendary profitability…with integrity.

The explosion of product-service information and availability on the web enables clients to switch suppliers at the drop of a hat unless barriers to exit are established, yet barriers erected purely for the company’s benefit often backfire. The Capture the Value™ phase brings you full circle with one difference; you can now reap the rewards of improved profitability by having customers themselves erect barriers to the competition when you leverage 3 uncommon attributes that most firms completely ignore.

The Capture the Value™ phase consists of 3 stages where you’ll profit from the value you have created for your customers:

Stage 8.	Capture Customers for Life with WOW Customer Experiences by tapping into the 1/2 of your customers’ decision-making abilities that you and your competitors are probably overlooking. This is customer experience management before the experience happens. It drives buzz and guerilla marketing opportunities, delivers an unbeatable competitive advantage, and dramatically improves customer satisfaction.
Stage 9.	Capture and Leverage Authentic Loyalty by addressing 3 hidden factors that are far more important than “relationship” in driving the repeat buyer behavior that you want and in increasing customer lifetime value. As you see changes in behavior, you’ll use a new approach to customer segmentation that will significantly boost your bottom line.
Stage 10.	Capture ExtraOrdinary Value and Profit™ by pulling six profit levers, capitalizing on all the value you’ve already created, and setting the stage with your customers for a new value-renewal Cycle.

20-40% of customers who leave will come back and do more business, under one condition.

You have a 60% probability of securing this specific type of customer… but only a 5-20% probability of securing the type that most sales people spend their time on. Does your salesforce know the difference?

A 5% increase in this common metric can boost profits by 25-45%.

There are two key thresholds for a critical customer-focused ratio that most firms never measure and which never turns up on your financials. But they determine whether your firm thrives or goes out of business.

Every 90 days, tackle an area of your business and see tangible results:

Forget the hype of “Customer-Driven”, “Innovation-Driven”, “Cost-Driven”, “Profit-Driven”, “Best Practices” and all the other management mantras touted by leadership courses and books as silver bullets. The Legendary Value Cycle™ is not a flavor-of-the-month tactic or a one-time event – instead, this is a comprehensive, systematic, roadmap for success, and a process that includes a simple, integrated set of practical, proven, profitable solutions for motivated business leaders who want to transform their organization and deliver superior results with integrity. Only customers create sustainable cash flow, and only the ideas and actions contributed by engaged employees can earn the customer’s willingness to trade cash for value received. When value is created for all stakeholders including customers, employees, investors, suppliers, and the community, the business will thrive, because fair exchange of value is the only driver of long-term, sustainable success.

So its not about more conventional strategy consulting… yet another leadership development program… more management coaching… another corporate team building event… or another motivational program. Its about taking a triage approach to identify strengths and challenges, and its about selecting the best starting point for an effective transformational process that combines practical knowledge and wisdom with great execution, leading to earning profit – with integrity.You can tackle the 10 Stages in the Cycle at your own pace in bite-size, logical steps that build on each other over time, or use any step on a standalone basis to triage specific challenges. And you can use the toolkits and resources over and over again, each time building more value deep into the DNA of your organization. Hands-on support is always available if you need a bit of outside input to see things more clearly or get unstuck.

These success stories prove how well this works:

1. A Fortune-500 commodity-type manufacturer decreased its average customer discount from 40% to less than 5% and earned client loyalty that resulted in re-purchase behavior without a competitive bid process
2. Shifting the competitive playing field for a leading but highly commoditized wireless product delivered a 583% revenue increase, a doubling of market share, and a 5-fold increase in sales productivity.
3. Increasing employee engagement and unleashing their great ideas for streamlining systems eliminated all overtime costs, cut excess inventory by a factor of 5, and reduced product obsolescence in a Fortune 500 high-tech firm.
4. A small financial services firm more than doubled its revenues and profits in less than 2 years using a creative approach to penetrate new markets that also reduced costs in existing markets. A lucrative IPO became feasible despite a very depressed investment market.

The “circuit training” approach transforms your organization’s Ordinary Value into Legendary Value™ more quickly and easily than you can imagine.

Just as with Circuit training, you’ll start with some basics to build core strength and flexibility. Over time, you’ll expand the “weight” or “range” of each the “exercises” to build greater strength, flexibility, and agility.

You’ll see immediate results with Quick Win approaches that deliver the kinds of results you saw in the Success Stories above, and you’ll lay the foundation for sustainable longer term results as you go through each Phase.

And the Legendary Value Cycle™ fills a key gap in traditional executive development efforts and overcome the obstacles that confound and frustrate many business leaders.

Legendary Value Institute™ programs address the shortfalls in conventional management development programs, business best sellers, internal corporate universities, and other external consulting and training organizations because it is a process that becomes part of your corporate culture – just like regular “circuit training” compared to an occasional work-out – in 6 ways:

1. Cost effective: Why send just one person to a seminar, when you can engage all the key resources in your organization, and gain substantially more impact as a result?
2. Time-effective: There’s no downtime for travel or learning generic “shoulds” at a seminar that you’ll never have the time or support to implement. Learning is embedded into everyday workloads in a manageable way, so there’s no downtime, no “catch up mode” upon return… which often relegates seminar binders to the shelf for “someday”.
3. Specific “how to’s” build knowledge and competency deep into your organization: Simple, practical, uncommon thinking is leveraged to create tangible results that are measured every step of the way. Solutions are time-tested and proven, yet flexible enough to adapt to your own environment. No mumbo-jumbo, no reports that sit on a shelf. The cross-functional team approach not only provides for different perspectives to create better outcomes, but embeds knowledge into and across the organization that can be used over and over again. This is a great tool for leadership development and corporate team building, and increases buy-in and success.
4. The “learn by doing” approach delivers tangible outcomes, measurable results and ROI quickly compared to just “book learning”. Knowledge transfer that helps you become self-sufficient in using the tools and methodologies for ongoing value is a key outcome. No need to pay expensive consultants over and over – you profit when you bring the knowledge in-house in ways your employees can make their own. Your team will learn as they implement, easily getting beyond good intentions into great execution that drops right to the bottom line.
5. Completely integrated to target all the core areas of your business, the Legendary Value Cycle™ enables the good things you’re already doing (like Lean, Six Sigma, Executive Coaching etc) to “plug and play”, rather than being prescriptive and having to do things “our way” – this is not one-size-fits-all.
6. Numerous cost-effective options provide the support you need. If you’ve ever gone to a seminar then wrestled with how to implement, you’ll appreciate this component. Programs are flexible, offering do-it-yourself approaches, powerful peer-learning masterminds, and full-blown personal coaching and consulting. There are no one-size-fits-all restrictions on how to get the help you need, and its always just a few clicks or a phone call away.

Is the Legendary Value Cycle™ for you?

The Legendary Value Cycle™ is not for everyone… especially not for the faint of heart… but it WILL be right for you if you are committed to transformational leadership and want to join the top 1% of business leaders who take action rather than getting mired in good intentions.

Like any “fitness” program, its going to take hard work and the perseverance and persistence to stick with it over time, yet when you commit to using the Legendary Value Cycle™ as circuit training, you’ll build the kind of highly profitable organization that the best resources aspire to work with and that the most valuable customers never want to leave… a company with Legendary Value™, worthy of being included on the “Best of…” and “Most Respected…” lists.

Now, doesn’t that sound like the formula for success and peace of mind that’s missing from what you’re doing today? Just imagine when you can finally:

1. feel a sense of relief, knowing that everyone in your firm is crystal-clear on your goals and what they need to do next…
2. go to work each day with a sense of anticipation of what you and your team will accomplish that day…
3. be completely confident that you have the skills and tools to lead not just your firm, but your industry…
4. experience a sense of exhilaration as you start to see results and get the recognition and respect you deserve.