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Keynotes & Executive Seminar Topics

These highly interactive presentations are tailored, both in design and delivery, to those responsible for conceiving and/or executing change initiatives to significantly improve performance, creativity, and satisfaction. Our keynotes are 1.5-2 hours in length; executive seminars are 2-4 hours and include application of key concepts to participants’ real work or life experience.  Sessions are relevant for members of the C-suite, aspiring disruptors, change leaders, initiative champions, and individual contributors. All content is based on a proven, breakthrough paradigm that is made easy to understand at a personal level, connected to contemporary strategic and operational issues every organizational faces. Material is universally appropriate for all industries and endeavors. Matters that seem very difficult to solve are revealed as easy to remedy, when looked at with a brand new perspective and new tools you can apply today across every functional area, such as:

  • Customer Service
  • Engineering
  • Human Resources
  • Information Technology
  • Marketing
  • Process Improvement
  • Product Management and Development
  • Quality
  • Senior Leadership
  • Strategic Planning
  • Supply Management

See what attendees think of our sessions.

Capture and Deploy the VOC:

Deliver What Customers Want, Build Cross-Silo Cohesion

Most executives and change leaders emphasize that customer satisfaction and excellent service are top priorities and keys to success.  This session is all about how to achieve those goals with speed and simplicity.  The answers use unconventional thinking to achieve outstanding results.

The magnitude of the challenge becomes clear when you ask any ten employees (a) what “service” means, (b) who “the customer” is or (c) what customers’ top priorities are.  Leaders are often surprised that consensus is elusive, meaning success will be, too.  How can we have evidence-based enterprise direction when we aren’t clear who to get the evidence from or what to ask?  We can fix this by using a new paradigm and pragmatic method for achieving unambiguous agreement on the answers to these essential questions. Your goals for understanding, measuring and satisfying customers are suddenly simplified and magic happens. 

Tools such as surveys, quality function deployment (QFD), the Kano model, ISO 9000, LSS and others have attempted to capture the voice of the customer (VOC). While they have all made contributions, NONE answer key questions every practitioner must answer. This session provides those answers.  You will be equipped to go beyond traditional approaches that rely on surveys, reactive problem-solving and Industrial Age methods that are soooo last century.

Once we understand what customers want, it is often assumed delivery will be straightforward, customer experience advances and competitiveness will improve.  Rarely is that the case.  Success is dependent on seamlessly aligning the customer priorities across the relevant functional silos within the enterprise. The methodology you will learn shows how to do this with speed and simplicity, while building employee engagement. 

One example that illustrates what is possible:  One organization learned and applied what its customers wanted most.  It deployed the new knowledge across several functional groups, creating a common mission and method of execution.  Results included jumping from a rank of 25th to 3rd of fifty competitors in performance and satisfaction in 18 months, simultaneously winning top Baldrige Award honors and saving $20 million. The tidal wave of customer kudos felt good, too. Many practitioners like you have gotten similar results.

The advanced, easy-to-apply concepts you will use are particularly well suited to knowledge work. That’s because your #1-ranked ASQ 2017 presenter and author, Robin Lawton, and co-presenter Tony Belilovskiy, specifically developed this system for knowledge-intensive organizations, not manufacturing.  But many industries now use it, confirming many users’ conclusion that any organization can become a model of customer-centered excellence.

The methodology presented combines both rigor and simplicity for a repeatable method accessible to all practitioners, no matter what their role in the enterprise. Humor is used throughout, making an otherwise dry and technical topic fun, personally relevant and memorable.

Content Outline

  • The weak practices most often used to understand customers
  • Why surveys fail and the essential keys to success
  • The four dimensions of excellence customers want satisfied
  • How to define service and knowledge work as concrete, tangible and measurable
  • Who “the customers” really are (beyond labels like buyers, consumers, guests, etc.)
  • The specific steps to uncover customer priorities
  • “Word formulas” you didn’t learn in school, but are as powerful as math
  • How to distinguish performance, perception and outcome expectations
  • The three roles a customer can play, and which one should have the power (but doesn’t)
  • How to destroy silo warfare and create strong teams with a shared vision of success
  • Cases of better than 20-to-1 ROI in less than two years
  • An easy to understand, step-by-step method for defining what your customers want
  • An Excellence Framework that balances customer and enterprise values
  • A jargon-free language that eliminates ambiguity
  • A clear roadmap for uncovering, translating and integrating voice of the customer with process, product development, innovation, measurement and demonstrable excellence
  • The method to (a) differentiate 3 roles a customer can play in any context, (b) uncover customer priorities in any context, and (c) deploy the voice of the customer across silos

Don’t even think about conducting a voice of the customer (VOC) project, commissioning a customer survey, or designing new products or services without the innovative methodology provided in this session. You’ll learn how to:

  • Create the strategic framework for your VOC initiative
  • Compare the most common ways to collect customer needs
  • Avoid the ten most frequent failures of satisfaction surveys
  • Determine who your customers really are in every context
  • Use “word formulas” that always uncover priorities
  • Connect customer satisfaction, service improvement and growth

90 minutes to 4 hours

Other lengths available in Training Topics

Strategy and Tools for Transformation Leaders

This session is designed to make complex transformation much easier, the pace much faster, and the results bigger than anything you’ve seen.

It is normal to attack single symptoms of organizational under-performance as if they are the root causes preventing excellence and transformation.  Themes masquerading as the cure include process improvement, employee engagement, service responsiveness, waste and cost reduction, technology adoption, and performance measurement.  As an insightful leader, you recognize true pursuit of excellence is multi-dimensional, constrained by organizational culture, and is a highly complex endeavor. This session shows how you can align strategy, culture, customer experience, and human performance.  Examples show how speed, simplicity, and practicality are applied for your personal and organizational success.

The new leader is impatient to achieve “impossible” outcomes, excite customers, engage empowered employees and set new measures of success others can only dream about.  It is a tall order requiring an entirely new focus, paradigm and tools.  Success requires a transformation system as well as a systems approach to transformation.  This session provides you with both. It starts with transforming how you envision excellence, showing how to achieve what you never thought possible, such as these repeated practitioner results:

  • New monthly revenue of $8 million
  • Process time reductions of 80%
  • Cost savings of $20 million in two years
  • Customers transformed into raving fans
  • Dramatic improvement in employee selection, placement, performance
  • Measurement of intangible knowledge work across the enterprise
  • National & industry awards for excellence and best-in-class performance
  • Engaged employees who view their work as a calling, not a job
  • A cultural IQ assessment revealing excellence strengths/needs in four key areas of leadership
  • 10 Steps to Excellence: Your road map to success
  • Six Leadership Levers: Eliminate the sources of ambiguity, confusion, chaos and conflict; simplify and accelerate cultural change
  • 8 Dimensions of Excellence framework that integrates and balances priorities related to initiatives, measures, strategy, operations and values
  • A tool that removes “service” ambiguity, making intangible work concrete and measurable
  • Mastering Excellence: A Leader’s Guide to Aligning Strategy, Culture, Customer Experience and Measures of Success. (An optional resource provided by event organizer.)

This fast paced, interactive session shows you how to:

  1. Use new tools to connect strategy, daily work and customer insight
  2. Define the most intangible knowledge work as concrete, measurable and repeatable by design
  3. Determine who “the customer” really is in every context and why it matters
  4. Inject existing initiatives with a strong customer bias, strengthening what you do well
  5. Strengthen the four areas of performance most measurement systems miss

Robin Lawton is an internationally recognized author, executive coach and expert in creating rapid strategic alignment between enterprise objectives and customer priorities.  Rob has directed strategic and operational improvement initiatives since 1985. He coined the term “customer-centered culture” with Creating a Customer-Centered Culture: Leadership in Quality, Innovation and Speed (1993).  His fourth book, published in 2017, is Mastering Excellence: A Leader’s Guide to Aligning Strategy, Culture, Customer Experience & Measures of Success.  Both books are 5-star rated at Amazon.  Thousands of leaders have used his powerful but easy-to-understand principles, strategies and tools to improve and measure service, knowledge work and customer satisfaction.

Mr. Lawton was ranked #1 of 103 speakers by ASQ in 2017,with similar recognition by leadership organizations such as the Japan Management Association, Chamber of Commerce, Federal Executive Board, Association for Manufacturing Excellence, American Marketing Association, International Standards Organization, Society of Health Systems and many others.  Rob was named “Quality Guru” by Quality Progress journal.  His numerous articles have been published internationally and in several languages.

Tony Belilovskiy joined the C3 Excellence team following a very successful career in healthcare and business.  His diverse expertise includes engineering in metallurgy, ballistics, licensed clinician, healthcare administration, auditor, healthcare consulting, and entrepreneurial business ownership.  His experience ranges from clinical, healthcare administration, contract administration and negotiations, financial analysis, business and people management, systems implementations and mergers, data analysis, medical claims analysis, college and university course development, and varied projects that come with owning your own management consulting business. 

Tony holds Bachelors in Cardiopulmonary Sciences and Masters in Healthcare Management and Administration from Northeastern University in Boston, MA; Associates Degree in Metallurgy from Odessa Polytechnic Institute in Odessa, Ukraine.  He is a Registered Respiratory Therapist and Certified Professional Coder.  In addition to all of the above, Tony is also an accomplished classical pianist.  He resides in Sarasota, FL with his wife of over 20 years and 3 daughters.

Rob and Tony’s presentations integrate audience participation, humor and current events.  The result is a highly inspiring, personally relevant and insight-producing experience you will feel compelled to act on, using the tools he provides.

90 to 120 minutes

Other lengths available in Training Topics

Strategic Project Management for Operational Excellence

Transformation leaders, project managers and initiative champions have achieved eye-popping, repeatable, and sustainable results others can only dream about.  Their secrets include adoption of a new paradigm and tools for process improvement, customer focus, and innovation projects where the problems are visible but the solution is unknown. The insightful leader needs to be highly effective at:

  • Selecting the critical few issues for focus, from too many choices
  • Defining the process problem so well it is half-solved
  • Avoiding scope creep and team dysfunction
  • Incorporating the voice of the customer priorities into process work
  • Changing how process owners & teams think to reveal innovative solutions
  • Using new tools, going beyond tired past practices of the last century
  • Assuring the remedy is compelling, unimpeachable and executed fast

This session shows you exactly how to do that, providing a new paradigm, roadmap and tools.  Success requires a transformation system as well as a systems approach to transformation. You’ll get both.  See how insightful leaders achieved “impossible” outcomes, excited customers, engaged employees and set new measures of success at high speed others can only dream about.  Learn how multiple practitioners got lightning fast results such as $20 million in savings, response and cycle time reductions of 80%, and recognition for best-in-class enterprise performance.  If you are an executive, change agent, innovation leader or Lean Six Sigma MBB impatient for transformative results, this jargon-free session is for you.

  • The 8 Dimensions of Excellence framework that aligns your project with strategic, operations, and customer priorities
  • New Process Selection Criteria that enables you to determine which process(es) to improve or innovate for high ROI and satisfaction
  • An elegantly simple Process Mapping approach that cuts >50% of your mapping/measuring effort and reduces 80% of total process cycle time
  • A Transformation Roadmap that shows what should happen before and after any improvement project to assure biggest impact
  • A Project Charter for successful completion of an operational excellence project, reducing confusion, chaos, conflict, and scope creep

Robin Lawton is an internationally recognized author, executive coach and expert in creating rapid strategic alignment between enterprise objectives and customer priorities.  Rob has directed strategic and operational improvement initiatives since 1985. He coined the term “customer-centered culture” with Creating a Customer-Centered Culture: Leadership in Quality, Innovation and Speed (1993).  His fourth book, published in 2017, is Mastering Excellence: A Leader’s Guide to Aligning Strategy, Culture, Customer Experience & Measures of Success.  Both books are 5-star rated at Amazon.  Thousands of leaders have used his powerful but easy-to-understand principles, strategies and tools to improve and measure service, knowledge work and customer satisfaction.

Mr. Lawton was ranked #1 of 103 speakers by ASQ in 2017,with similar recognition by leadership organizations such as the Japan Management Association, Chamber of Commerce, Federal Executive Board, Association for Manufacturing Excellence, American Marketing Association, International Standards Organization, Society of Health Systems and many others.  Rob was named “Quality Guru” by Quality Progress journal.  His numerous articles have been published internationally and in several languages.

Tony Belilovskiy joined the C3 Excellence team following a very successful career in healthcare and business.  His diverse expertise includes engineering in metallurgy, ballistics, licensed clinician, healthcare administration, auditor, healthcare consulting, and entrepreneurial business ownership.  His experience ranges from clinical, healthcare administration, contract administration and negotiations, financial analysis, business and people management, systems implementations and mergers, data analysis, medical claims analysis, college and university course development, and varied projects that come with owning your own management consulting business. 

Tony holds Bachelors in Cardiopulmonary Sciences and Masters in Healthcare Management and Administration from Northeastern University in Boston, MA; Associates Degree in Metallurgy from Odessa Polytechnic Institute in Odessa, Ukraine.  He is a Registered Respiratory Therapist and Certified Professional Coder.  In addition to all of the above, Tony is also an accomplished classical pianist.  He resides in Sarasota, FL with his wife of over 20 years and 3 daughters.

Rob and Tony’s presentations integrate audience participation, humor and current events.  The result is a highly inspiring, personally relevant and insight-producing experience you will feel compelled to act on, using the tools he provides.

90 minutes to 4 hours

Other lengths available in Training Topics