“Tony worked with our senior leadership team on two occasions. With a wealth of industry experience, our leadership team was sought out by several large conference coordinators, analysts and media to speak and comment about industry topics. Tony worked with the leadership team to improve their presentation skills and increase their communication effectiveness. He provided counsel and recommendations to ensure the team was fully prepared to present at national conferences and as media opportunities arose. His facilities allowed the team to get away from day-to-day demands and focus time to fully prepare themselves. He was engaging, thoughtful and his insight helped the team feel a new level of confidence as presenters.”

Top qualities: Personable , High Integrity , Creative

Jan Tankersley
hired Tony as a Business Consultant in 2004

The speed of life is a global condition that presents a strategic challenge for everyone.  The speed of life combines excessive amounts of unrefined information with a glut of choices and opportunities and presents itself in the form of confusion and distraction!  How well we function within this constant condition determines value, competitive advantage and the ability to create results that will convert a vision or a dream into reality.  These issues are always important but in tough economic times they are absolutely critical to success.

The speed of life can’t be stopped but it can be understood and leveraged in a positive way.  It is a fact that knowledge and information have always been a cornerstone of power, influence and achievement!  However, the speed of life generates so much information it creates distractions that unwittingly lead people into well-intentioned busyness.  It is a form of busyness that marginalizes results.  The solution is to identify and deploy high leverage activities that harness the right information at the right time and focus on action that will move the results needle!

The only thing certain about the speed of life is uncertainty.  It is impossible to accurately forecast future conditions over a long period of time and an  approach based on the principle of ‘going as far as you can see — so that you can see farther’  is needed.  Such a strategy is created by concentrating on the three strategic issues that matter most:  Clarity, Focus, and Execution.

CLARITY
If you have no cohesive vision there is little chance of achieving sustained success in a bad economy.  Think about this:  Most organizations have adopted vision and mission statements; however, many within those organizations find it difficult to articulate the vision or mission, without reading it.  This condition is typical and may be evidence that there is no real  clarity about the vision and how to achieve it.  Unless there is clarity regarding a vision — there is no vision!

When businesses have clarity concerning their vision it lives!  It also creates zeal and passion for the commitment and determination needed to execute the vision.  The vision itself becomes able to pull everyone forward.  The pulling effect is created because clarity impacts people at the level of belief and produces voluntary change in attitudes and behavior.

Clarity is achieved when we have an unfettered view of our vision and understand what we really want, why we want it, the value of doing it and the highest purpose for doing it!

FOCUS
Focus is the opposite of distraction!  At the speed of life,  success hinges on the ability to cut through the clutter and focus on the high leverage activities that directly impact results.  Focus is not something that comes naturally for most people, and that is why it is a skill that must be learned, polished, and practiced. Specifically, focus is a thinking skill that is acquired as a result of mental discipline.

Because the human mind serves as a connector of facts and information, fresh input is the raw material of creativity, opportunity recognition and problem solving.  The mind is always hungry for new information because it stimulates thought and is fulfilling.  Unfortunately, basic process of thinking provides the opportunity for distraction.  Distraction is always the path of least resistance and the most natural activity for the mind to embrace.  The speed of life offers up scores of opportunities each day that lure us into distractions that gobble time.

Between today’s conditions and tomorrows hope is a gap that must be crossed.  In that gap is every goal, objective and action step that must be taken to be successful.  Achieving focus is a matter of identifying the high-leverage activities in the gap that powerfully impact results and developing the mental skills to insure they receive the time they deserve.

EXECUTION
The ability to persuade others has a direct impact on achieving superior results, faster, which is what the speed of life demands.   As we gain clarity and develop our focusing skills, the need to concentrate on high-leverage activities becomes paramount.  However, identifying and focusing on those activities is only the beginning.  Once our high-leverage activities are known the challenge of actually doing them becomes the issue.  People must be persuaded to focus on these activities and to act quickly!  This always involves exceeding expectations.

There is more to exceeding expectations than adopting the idea as a strategy.  Exceeding expectations has its greatest impact when it is adopted by individuals as a way of life.  When you have a group of people who are willing to exceed expectations in the normal course of their daily activity a powerful force for superior results is created.

People in businesses and organizations are persuaded to exceed expectations based on the positive strategic presence of their leadership team. Leaders create images of influence in the minds of those they lead and those images define the organizational perception of leadership.    It is this overall persona that creates what I call Strategic Presence.  Leaders are constantly creating positive and negative Strategic Presence based on their values and their behavior.   The most important fact about Strategic Presence is that it produces two possible reactions in others.  It either produces voluntary cooperation or it produces various forms of resistance.  If the Strategic Presence of leadership is highly positive, people will be more likely to support the vision of leadership.  If the Strategic Presence of leadership is negative, people will not be willing to exceed expectations.  They may actually try to undermine the goals of leadership!

The key to persuasion is Strategic Presence and the ability to communicate strategically is the foundation for both.  Organizations frequently treat communication as a collection of skills, or just another training or coaching objective.  This idea represents a tactical approach to communication.  If execution can be seen as a train rolling down a track to a predetermined destination, communication is the engine that powers the train!  If you can’t communicate effectively you will not execute effectively

©2008 Tony Jeary, author of Strategic Acceleration: Succeed at the Speed of Life

Author
Tony Jeary, author of Strategic Acceleration: Succeed at the Speed of Life, has been and continues to be the coach to the world’s top CEOs and high achievers for more than 20 years. His clients include the Presidents of Wal-Mart, Firestone, Shell, Samsung, New York Life, and the United States Senate, to name only a few. An advisor to many, Tony Jeary has invested his life and career in helping others discover new clarity for their vision, develop focus on direction, and create powerful execution strategies that strategically impact achievement and results. Tony is happily married and blessed with 2 great daughters.

http://www.strategicacceleration.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Direct-Selling-News-Strategic-Clarity.pdf

Strategic Acceleration produces clarity and focus about things that need to be said. Communication Mastery provides the methodology and the means by which those things can be said. The result of Communication Mastery is growth, enhancement of perceived value in the marketplace and sustainable methodologies that yield highly productive cultures characterized by accomplishment.

As Strategic Acceleration becomes a reality, communication skills and abilities are elevated at every level. They are raised not by the training of individual presentation and speaking skills, but by the presence of a system that produces clarity and focus and the ability to execute. When people have clarity, focus and execution they are confident. When they have tools and processes that facilitate their communication objectives they become better communicators. When a system of communication is established, the ability of the team is elevated. A rising tide raises all boats and that is the effect of Communication Mastery.

Organizations are actually living things composed of people whose success depends on their collective ability to express the common values, focused objectives and proven practices that will yield dynamic growth and sustained success. When people within an organization communicate, their goal must be to do so at a level that produces measurable impact. Some are able to communicate more effectively and powerfully than others and have greater impact. Tony Jeary presents Communication Mastery as a system capable of lifting everyone to higher levels of impact. As entire organizations elevate their communication standards, their impact on people improves from Basic to Mastery over time. The greater the impact, the more profound the results. This concept is graphically depicted with the “Impact Curve Graphic.”

So, what is the effect of Communication Mastery? Four things always appear:

When I was a kid, my dad taught me the most important business principle of my life: “Give value: do more than is expected!” For individuals and businesses to realize their vision and truly succeed, this principle should drive all thought processes. It is the foundation of whatever success I have enjoyed, and in fact, my entire business is based on helping my clients develop and execute their visions based on that idea.

Leadership is a results contest. If leaders don’t deliver results, they are asked to step down and are replaced by others. In the case of the self-employed, if they don’t deliver results, they go out of business. A powerful concept every leader must understand is the relationship of value to results. As Warren Buffett stated so well:
“Price is what you pay; value is what you get.”

We’ve all heard the term buyer’s remorse. I think it is a polite term for the way people feel when they have purchased something and the item or the experience did not meet their felt needs and expectations. In many instances, this disappointment accelerates through remorse and becomes anger. We have all found ourselves in this disappointing condition, and it’s all about value. Did we get what we wanted, and did the product or service meet or exceed our felt needs and expectations? The negatives of disappointment are significant, but there is a huge positive impact on results when products or services exceed value expectations.

Think about this: when a product or service meets the expectation of customers, those customers will be satisfied with their purchase, and they will not be remorseful about the purchase. However, if the product or service merely meets an expectation, it will not always translate into growth for the business. Just meeting an expectation doesn’t get people excited. They are merely satisfied with what they got for their money. They won’t necessarily become a raving fan and tell others about the product or service. Worse, they remain open to the sales and marketing efforts of competitors and are more likely to buy based on price, rather than value. People who are merely satisfied are people who can be influenced by your competitors who are able to sell on the basis of value. These are the people who can shift market share percentages when they shift their allegiance to products or services that promise to exceed their expectations through greater value.

When we buy something that exceeds our expectations, we are blown away by our good fortune. We can’t believe that we “got all of this” for what we paid. What we got could be a combination of product quality, customer support, the effect the product had on our lives, or any other thing that’s makes us happy about the money we spent. When our expectations are exceeded, we become walking advertisements and testimonials for the product or service. Every time we run across a friend with a similar need, we tell them about what we got for what we paid. We are raving fans at that point, and a raving fan can’t be tempted and lured away by competitors. This is the kind of customer that leads to growth and great results for any business