Our New #1Day Corporate Trainings for Execs

Since 2007, we’ve designed and delivered many corporate trainings for execs and management teams on innovation, strategy, culture change, etc. They were rarely stand-alone programs, but were always designed to support a consulting mission we had with a company. Following that, their goal has always been to allow the teams involved to appropriate our tools and mindset, and get autonomous cross-divisions, to follow up on the outputs of our mission.

This was business as usual. But a few years ago, things changed.

We started to have key execs talking shop with us on things like « innovation » or « digital » and telling us that if they had to be really honest about it, they didn’t « really » get it.

Remember 2015-16 when we were at peak startup hype in big corporations? The buzzwords flying around in executive committees were all about digital transformation, business agility, culture shift, innovating like startups, etc. Now in 2019 we are paying the price: most corporate incubators have shelved their 3D printers and quietly closed down, innovation conferences are deserted, learning expeditions in the Silicon Valley are rare and a few, and public innovation programs refocus on « deep » tech. And as I said we didn’t pay attention. As a small team operation, we were picking our battles. We were not trading in the hype, and most of our customers didn’t either. We felt insulated from the BS flying around and were actively avoiding the startup circus. Even just two weeks ago I had an easy time saying to a potential customer that « No we don’t go to the CES Las Vegas » to « see where innovation is going » because in his market we already monitor new retail in Shanghai. Or that we don’t do design thinking because we’ve never done blue ocean strategy, open innovation, jugaad innovation, or hackathons when they were trendy. But we know how to translate the potential of technology as added value for your market and build effective strategies with your teams and with sharp focus.

This is all fine, but still there is now a price to pay. Even for us at our small scale, a lot of our potential corporate customers are objectively messed up. It’s becoming harder and harder to talk with corporations that have not been burned with sexy and yet useless methodologies, trends, and post-its sessions.

So we decided to do the unthinkable.

We will deliver stand-alone corporate trainings on three BIG subjects : « digital », « innovation », and « culture ». The key deliverables in each case are to cut to the chase and to get both the high level logic and highly effective (operable) frameworks.

These three corporate trainings are designed for top managers with five key principles:

1. Cut to the bone and self-contain each training over only one day.
2. Give both a complete and practical map of the topic so that in any given context, execs can navigate and deliver.
3. Transfer a toolbox that we have worked with for hundreds of hours as well as a mindset.
4. Work at a strategic level but with a clear « real life » business focus and ROIs (plurals).
5. Execs should be able to action everything by themselves the next day.

As such the « innovation » training for example, is organized in four parts:

(1) Organizing and leveraging risk ;

(2) Investing in markets’ problems ;

(3) Engineering value ;

(4) Dealing with startups, trends and hype.

This is 90% of what you need to deal as a non-specialist but effective level B or C executive in any market (B2B, B2C, B2G or C2C).

Lastly, an important point:

About 30% of these corporate trainings are tailor-made for your company. Your starting point on « innovation », « digital » or « culture » will be different from another company. Your market will be different. Your teams have different mindsets. And even if the frameworks will be the same, a L’Oréal or a Siemens won’t use them in the same way. If we play the game of delivering high-impact trainings within a short time frame, this has to be adjusted.

If this makes sense to you and you are tired of chasing your tail about these subjects, or being dealt the same typical trainings… Well, just contact us. 😎

Stay tuned, I will detail the trainings further in an other article.