Ram Charan

Ram Charan is a highly acclaimed business advisor, speaker, and author. For 35 years, Charan has coached some of the world's most successful CEOs, and worked behind the scenes at companies like GE, DuPont, KLM, Bank of America, Home Depot, EDS, Duke Energy and Verizon.

Charan started his business career as a teenager working in the family shoe shop in India. He went on to earn an engineering degree and then MBA and doctorate degrees from Harvard Business School. After graduating from Harvard with high distinction, Charan was a Baker Scholar, and later a professor at the Harvard Business School.
Charan is known for his practical, real world perspective. His expertise runs deep in several areas of business:

· Profitable Growth
· Leadership
· Global Strategy
· Innovation
· Succession & Leadership Pipeline     
· Business Acumen
· Execution
· Global Matrix Organization
· Board of Directors
· Top Management Teams

Charan is a favourite among executive educators. He won the Bell Ringer (best teacher) award at GE's famous Crotonville Institute. He won similar awards at Wharton Business School and Northwestern University. He was listed as one of Business Week's top ten resources for in-house executive development programs.

As an author, Charan has written several books including: Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, What the CEO Wants You to Know, Boards at Work, The Leadership Pipeline, Every Business is a Growth Business, The Game Changer, Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don't, Leaders at All Levels, What the Customer Wants You to Know, Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty, and Owning Up: The 14 Questions That Every Board Member Needs to Ask. He also tailors his books for specific client companies, and has done so for Gateway, Ford and EDS. Charan's articles have been published in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Time, Director's Monthly, and USA Today.

Charan serves on two corporate boards - Austin Industries and Biogenex. He was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. He serves on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Corporate Governance.

• 1. 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.

• 2. 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.

• 3. 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.

• 4. 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 Wal-Mart, Dell, and GE use execution to outcompete
  • The framework of flawless execution
  • Tools to develop your own discipline of execution

• 
  %6$s

  %4$s

  %5$s
%7$s