Ram Charan
Author & business advisor famous among business leaders for his ability to solve tough problems & provide down to earth advice
Ram Charan is a highly sought after business advisor and speaker famous among senior executives for his uncanny ability to solve their toughest business problems. For more than thirty-five years, Dr. Charan has worked behind the scenes with top executives at some of the world’s most successful companies, including GE, Verizon, Novartis, Thomson Corporation, and Bank of America. He has shared his insights with many others through teaching and writing. Dr. Charan is well known for providing advice that is down to earth and relevant, taking into account the real-world complexities of business. Over the past decade, Dr. Charan has captured his business insights in numerous books and articles. In the past five years, his books have sold more than 2 million copies. These include the bestseller Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done and Confronting Reality, both co-authored with Larry Bossidy, The Talent Masters and The Leadership Pipeline. He also co-authored The Game Changer, with AG Lafley, about driving revenue and profit growth through innovation. Many lucky people have come to know Dr. Charan through in-house executive education programs. It’s Dr. Charan’s energetic, interactive teaching style that has won him several awards, as well the hearts of his audiences.
Innovation and Growth
Companies need innovation for revenue and profit growth. But many people think innovation is unpredictable or out of reach. Ram Charan demystifies innovation and explains how powerhouses Procter & Gamble, Nokia, LEGO and Honeywell do it. With his penchant for real-world practicality, he translates insights from the best companies into concrete steps that make innovation repeatable and measurable. This session, based on Charan’s 2008 book, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit, Growth with Innovation covers the following:
- Putting the customer at the center of innovation
- The building blocks of innovation
- Innovation as a social process
- Reducing the risk of innovation failure
- How to be an innovation leader
Reinventing How You Sell
Too often selling becomes a war over price. Ram Charan shows the way out with a new approach to selling that starts with helping customers reach their business goals. Does it require new skills and ways of working? Yes, with salespeople leading the charge. Here Charan discusses companies that have made the shift and escaped from commodity-pricing hell. This session, based on Charan’s 2008 book, What the Customer Wants You to Know: How Everyone Needs to Think Differently About Sales, covers the following:
- How to put the fun back into selling
- Learning to see your customers holistically
- A new role for salespeople—and everybody else
- Shaping offerings customers willingly pay more for
Leadership Know-How
Charan brings realism and specificity to a subject that is often vague and amorphous: leadership. Why do so many leaders fail? Very simple, he says: they don’t know how to run a business. Charan breaks through the façade of leadership to explain the capabilities leaders must possess. He gives aspiring leaders a blueprint to take charge of their own development and help other leaders grow. This session, based on Charan’s 2007 book, Know-How: The 8 Skills that Separate People Who Perform From Those Who Don’t and his 2008 book, Leaders at All Levels: Deepening Your Talent Pool to Solve the Succession Crisis, covers the following:
- What teaching about leadership tends to miss
- The 8 capabilities leaders really need
- When and how personality matters
- Examples of leaders who have outstanding know-how in critical areas
- How to build and improve your know-how
- How to build a pipeline of leaders who deliver
Execution
For many leaders, creating a strategy is the easy part. Making it happen is the bigger challenge. Why is flawless execution so hard to achieve? Because few leaders understand what it demands. Execution takes personal discipline, and more important, a systematic approach to synchronizing the moving parts of the organization. Based on the best selling and highly praised book, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, this session explains:
- Why execution cannot be delegated
- How companies like Walmart, Dell, and GE use execution to out-compete
- The framework of flawless execution
- Tools to develop your own discipline of execution
