Wayne Strickland

Enterprise Leadership must have a personal, intimate understanding of the competitive landscape.  They can’t just rely on their own organizations to tell them their flat spots.  Their functional leaders, Marketing, I/T, Product Development, etc. will never say, “Our competition is much better than us.”  It’s more likely they will discuss the current operating plan and where they stand against making their budgets.  Research teams might tell you about emerging consumer needs but rarely provide you the plan to address them.

This presentation will walk you through the steps you need to take, leveraging your best, high potential middle manager talent to give you a seat at the table to learn what your competitors are saying to your largest customers.  Do you know what they are saying today?  Do you know what they are planning? Do you know their key metrics?

This plan will light a fire in your organization and have you focused on the marketplace instead of a conference room and get your organization moving faster.

Do you know what the next big idea is?  It’s being tested today and your competitor is learning how to scale it. Don’t be the last to know what your nest customers are planning with your competitors.

Amazon is the fastest growing retailer in the world and if you are not growing with them, you will not grow long term.  When I first started working with Amazon in 2015 these are some of the comments I heard from my contacts.

“It’s all about the Algorithm, there is nothing you can do.”

            “You will never get a meeting with anyone.”

            “Brands are not important.”

            “They want every SKU in your catalog.”

            “They don’t do business plans.”

Today, I have contacts across all the Amazon platforms and have been meeting regularly with their key leaders.  We developed business plans with shared metrics and common goals.

This presentation shares with you the Myths and the Musts of working with Amazon.

If you are not currently working with Amazon on multiple platforms you are losing ground in the marketplace, quickly.  The discussion should not be, “Should we invest in Amazon?” The question is, “How do we invest in Amazon.”

This presentation provides a plan that teaches your organization how to get started with minimum, if any, additional headcount by leveraging key outside resources to get you started.  Many companies try to hire an outside expert to get them started but that takes precious time to find the right person, get them up to speed and build them a team.  And many times that person can’t adjust to the company culture and the leave and you have an organizational issue to clean up.  The worst issue is that you have lost time and your competitors are building their market share while you are losing it.

This presentation tells you how to get started, where to invest, how to prioritize your resources, what metrics you should measure and how to eventually build your own team.

Each level of leadership requires vastly different skills.  Leaders must always be developing new skills if they want to be successful in their current role and move to the next level of leadership.

There are 3 Levels of Leadership;

• First Time Leader. This leader has just been promoted from being a manager. They must learn the difference between being a manager and a leader and learn how to get out of their own way.
• Cross-Functional Leader. This leader is leading people with skills much different than their own.  They must learn how to connect with their team and understand how to truly motivate them.
• Enterprise Leader. This leader makes the big decisions that either grow the business or people get sent home, including them.  This presentation discusses the key skills they must have to win in the marketplace.  Hint: it’s personal competitive intelligence.

The supply chain with have its challenging years, some years products will be great, other times not so much.  You will have brilliant marketing plans and years where they don’t get traction. We have all lived this many times.

But the culture you create as a leader will live beyond and transcend the good and the bad times. Leaders that develop a winning culture, build the best teamsand focus on the marketplace will out perform all other teams over time.

This presentation shows you how to build your winning culture.

It’s a leadership responsibility to bridge generational gaps in the workplace, not the employees.  There have always been generational gaps and great leaders find a way to turn these gaps into strengths that deliver the best results.

Leader’s #1 responsibility is to create a team that everyone in the organization wants to work on because they will learn new skills, grow in their career, get compensated for their results and will get promoted.

Leaders must build diverse teams that will challenge, debate, and drive new thinking.  To accomplish this, you must have multi-generational thinking that weaves in the wisdom of the experienced employees and the new thinking and enthusiasm of the younger employees.

Leaders must make this their top priority and drive a process that makes this happen.  It will not happen naturally.   This is work takes a time commitment and once started it can’t fall through the cracks because of day-to-day emergencies.  A leader can build trust and loyalty from their team by starting and completing this process.

I developed this 7 step process all leaders can follow to bridge generational gaps as well as turn gaps into high impact initiatives that will generate improved results on your team.

The steps are:

• Really getting to know your team
• Sharing what your team say’s is important to them
• Explaining your Leadership Philosophy
• Explaining your “nits”, the things that make you crazy
• Creating a “nit” resolution worksheet with your team
• Finding the solutions that closes generational gaps
• Sharing examples on how you solved the gaps with your team

In this keynote presentation, I will walk you through this 7 step process, step by step, so you can start to implement your plan immediately.

This is a plan you can implement if you have an existing team or building a new team.  It is equally effective for both.

This plan will create new, healthy, transparent and impactful behaviors that will drive results.