Speaking | Ron Wiens – Keynote Speaker

THE BUILDING OF A HIGH-PERFORMANCE, HIGH-ENERGY CULTURE

Talk by Ron Wiens (Time: 1, 2 or 3 hours depending on need)

In a world where the shelf-life of knowledge is approaching that of a banana, the path to organizational success has changed. In the Old West, they used to say that there were just two kinds of people – the quick and the dead. In the era of the knowledge economy the phrase might well be that there are just two types of organizations, the quick and the dying. The quick are embracing new ways of managing and leading while the dying are hanging on for dear life to the ways that brought them success in the past.

In the knowledge worker world, the ability of people to work together, to openly share their knowledge, to leverage each other’s insights, to create something new and wonderful on an ongoing basis, is the foundation of a high-performance culture. How people work together, how they interact, goes to the heart of what organizational culture is all about. Culture, a culture that facilitates this ongoing creation of new knowledge, a culture that’s about people building and creating together, has become today’s competitive advantage.

In this talk Ron shares with you his life’s learning for the building of a high-performance, high-energy culture.

FINDING GREAT LEADERS

Talk by Ron Wiens (Time: 1 or 2 hours depending on need)

Our organizations are filled with talent. We have the most educated workforce in the history of the human race. And it is the norm, not the exception, that people want to make a contribution. People want their lives to make a difference. So, amid all this talent, where are the up-and-coming leaders? Why are we not suffering from an embarrassment of riches when it comes to choosing new leaders? If the potential leaders are there, why are we not seeing them? The answer is, the lens that we are currently using to see and select the future leaders of our organizations has now passed its “sell-by” date. The current recruitment lens is making us blind to the talent in our midst.

So the question becomes, what lens would help us recognize the individuals in our midst who have the potential to lead and manage in a knowledge economy?

Ron shares his perspective on a new lens that will help to identify leaders who are capable of building a community of people who believe in themselves, believe in each other and believe in what the organization is trying to achieve. This represents a transformation in how we select leaders and how these “new lens” leaders will lead. In the era of the knowledge economy, this is the type of leadership that will ensure an organization’s ongoing success.

THE DRIVERS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURAL – A HOW-TO GUIDE FOR CULTURAL CHANGE

Talk by Ron Wiens (Time: 1 or 2 hours depending on need)

Organizational culture is all about how people work together, how they interact and what they value. Culture manifests itself in people’s behaviours and what they pay attention to. The new reality is that culture, the right culture, can provide an organization with significant competitive advantage. Culture can make or break the organization.

Two questions spring to mind. First, what constitutes a winning culture? And second, how does one go about transforming an existing culture into a winning culture?

Culture is all about people, so one would think that if you changed the people you could change the culture. But there is the 80% problem. You can replace 80% of your people with people who have the “right” set of behaviours and presto, you have your new culture. But here is the rub – come back in three years and you will find that more often than not the old culture has returned. So what is the key to successful cultural change, change that sticks and provides ongoing return?

You can’t change culture directly. To get the performance culture required for success you need to change those things that drive culture. And what drives culture? That is the question that Ron answers in this talk.

THE DELIVERY ENGINE – BUILDING A CULTURE THAT KNOWS HOW TO TURN IDEAS INTO REALITY

Talk by Ron Wiens (Time: 1 hour)

Organizations fail at change in large part because they have failed to build the discipline around the implementation of change. What makes an organization successful and differentiates it from the competition is its capacity for disciplined delivery. The key to an organization’s success is not just the brilliance of its change strategy but also the ability of its people to turn strategy into reality.

The first step, in almost any program for change, is the building of a culture that emphasizes, embraces and thrives on the disciplined implementation of ideas. In this talk Ron shares how he has helped organizations build such a culture through the introduction of a very simple set of governance processes, which he refers to as the Delivery Engine. The Delivery Engine is made up of three components – a terms of reference process, standardized and universal status reporting and a “war room” with publicly displayed project plans.

The Delivery Engine is nothing if not simple. It is, however, effective at helping to build, across an organization, a sense of accountability for on-time and on-budget delivery. The Delivery Engine keeps an organization focused on its priorities for change. It helps the members of the organization understand their organization’s change strategy and in so doing helps to build commitment to the success of the whole. And last but not least, it helps people to manage the distractions that plague today’s workplace.

Charles Darwin pointed out that it’s not the biggest, the brightest or the best that survive, but those that adapt the quickest. Ron’s talk reveals how the Delivery Engine approach dramatically grows an organization’s ability to adapt and change.