great business speakers

(by Tony D'Amelio) -- 2014 begins with great news. David Meerman Scott has joined D’Amelio Network for speaker management.

(by Tony D'Amelio) -- Spencer Johnson, author of Who Moved My Cheese and co-author of The One Minute Manager, was in New York before Christmas. We caught up for a chat and drinks at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. Spencer’s been a good friend for many years – someone I’ve turned to when I reached an important fork in the road and needed some advice on choosing the best path. As always, the conversation was lively and far reaching.

GEOFF COLVIN is best known for the columns, articles and features he writes for Fortune magazine and Money.CNN online. But for 27 years millions of radio listeners have also known him for his 90-second "Inside Business" segments heard nationally on the CBS Radio Network.

"Why are certain people so incredibly great at what they do? Most of us think we know the answer – but we're most always wrong. If we're wrong on this crucial question, we have zero chance of getting significantly better at anything we care about." -- Geoff Colvin

As a speaker, GEOFF COLVIN’s value to an audience is his relationship with the world’s top business leaders. From them he gathers insights into how the best companies are dealing with the challenges of 21st century business. His presentations are all the more valuable for it.

Matthew Shaer recently wrote an article in New York Magazine entitled The Boss Stops Here discussing the current state of flatter-transparent organizations and the evolution of bossless environments.

A recent Wall Street Journal article chronicled how McDonald's, battling back from recent earnings disappointments, is putting unusual emphasis on a longtime challenge: getting its far-flung workforce to provide service with a smile. The fast-food giant, whose restaurant sales in the U.S. began to slip last year, is pushing franchisees to improve staffing and service amid mounting complaints about rude employees.

Love and respect are like self-esteem: hollow if they’re not earned. On Benfold, I tried in large part to unify the crew by insisting on high performance and continual learning. The Navy has a special program, the Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialist Program (ESWS), designed to train sailors to go beyond their specialties and learn how the entire ship works. This training makes it easier to learn to backstop others, and it strengthens the ship’s performance, especially in a crisis. But the program is so difficult that only the most experienced sailors usually sign up for it. And since hardly anyone had passes ESWS in my predecessor’s time, the crew was convinced that it wasn’t feasible. So I streamlined the program, cutting out all the parts that didn’t apply to Benfold – perhaps 15% of the total. Then I told the crew that learning ESWS would train them to show visitors around the ship, a duty that was becoming enormously popular. In that light, the program didn’t look so hard, and nearly every sailor aboard signed up. In short order, we qualified nearly 200 of our 310 crew members. One of the qualifiers was Sarah Garner, who was shocked to learn that disgruntled crew members on my predecessor’s watch hid themselves away to avoid duty. Sarah became a great success, eventually getting selected for chief petty officer in eight years instead of the usual fourteen, and she was always one of the first to take on new jobs and learn entire new systems. At the beginning, the ESWS program looked impossible, she once told me, “but it ended up being fun. What it did was, it got you out talking to everyone. You got a chance to interact with other people on the ship whose jobs were so dissimilar from yours that you might not have a lot of interaction with them otherwise.” One day, on a missile training exercise with two other ships, Sarah found herself at a watch station on the combat systems coordinator’s office, where she realized that, on the other ships, the corresponding stations were being manned by a lieutenant and a master chief. At that point, she was still a second-class petty officer. Both of us were proud of what she had achieved. Even now in civilian life, Sarah says she still applies the lessons she learned on Benfold – in particular, that an organization is far more effective if its people understand each other’s jobs and why things are done the way they are.

Happy New Year! It was January 3rd last year when I announced formation of my speaker management firm, the D’Amelio Network. It’s been an exciting time since then with so much to do – launching something from scratch is not for the faint of heart, what with the need to create systems and processes for the most basic needs – things that can easily be taken for granted. But that’s all done and the reward now is doing business by our own rules. The chief rule is to not have too many of them – we want to be easy to work with and stay focused on creating a great outcome.

Soon people bicker, sabotage begins, and the workplace is totally dysfunctional. Making collaboration a reality is the vital antidote needed.