I had the pleasure of introducing Dave Logan as the opening keynote presenter for the Association for Strategic Planning annual conference in Pasadena yesterday.

Dave is a USC faculty member, best-selling author, and management consultant. At USC, he teaches in the Executive MBA, Master of Medical Management and Executive Education.  As co-founder and senior partner at CultureSync, a management consulting firm, Dave works with Fortune 500 companies, governments, and non-profit organizations.   He’s written four books, including Tribal Leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Communication from the Annenberg School at USC.

Although not an alumni of the Marshall School myself (I have a University of San Diego MBA), I first met Dave at a USC MBA Alumni gathering in San Diego several years ago, when his book Tribal Leadership was in pre-publication format.  Tribal Leadership is about leveraging natural groups to build a thriving organization.  Rather than TALK about the 5 stages of an organization’s culture, he DEMONSTRATED the five stages by assigning roles to 5 random individuals from the audience.

Dave was so effective at communicating the essence of Tribal Leadership that I immediately vetted him as a speaker for Vistage, where I was a chair at the time, and engaged him to speak to my CEO group about Tribal Leadership.  Again, Dave was interactive and inventive.  Using polling technology, he asked my CEO clients where they thought we were as a group within the five stages of Tribal Leadership.   The good news for me was, they gave the group very high marks.  Even more importantly, and to Dave’s credit, they were so committed to practicing Tribal Leadership distinctions in their organizations that they requested Dave return, which he did six months later.

I then garnered for myself a front row seat for the unveiling of Dave’s next book at the opening presentation of Landmark Education’s Conference on Global Leadership.   Called Three Laws of Performance, Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life, this book was an overnight best-seller.  I highly recommend that you pick it up if you want to read about deep, sustaining transformation in several highlighted organizations.  This book was co-authored with Steve Zaffron.

I could not think of a more dynamic way to begin our conference on strategic planning, with the theme of positioning for long-term success in a short-term world, than to hear Dave’s original thinking.  For me personally, he brings a focus to the BEING aspect of what we are DOING so that we can HAVE the results we seek. Dave embodies an extraordinary way of BEING engaging with content that is fresh, and rich, and delivering it so that the message sticks.

Dave left us with an immediate take-away, a model for devising an interim strategy, which I have pictured here, and which he invites you to use freely (open source)!  Best done as three separate questions in a group setting (for challenging your assumptions), it favors immediate results and in these trying times, who doesn’t want that?  If you have questions or if you want the PDF version please feel free to contact me.  If you find this useful, just please tell me how you used it, and what it did for you — I’ll tell Dave too!  He and I would like to know.

Here’s my intern.  Meet Marcel Schmidt, from Germany who is attending the California Internatioinal Business University (CIBU) for one semester.

I have appreciated interns throughout many of my years in San Diego, and none more than now!  Marcel actually found me on the internet!  He took the initiative to ask for an internship, and he is a very good producer of results.  His English is excellent, and he puts his head down and gets work done.

My responsibility is to see to it that Marcel has a good experience.  I have taken him to the MIT Enterprise Forum business case, I have invited him to take notes at an upcoming strategic planning facilitation that I am conducting, and I am asking him to sit in for me at a networking event where it matters that someone is in my seat when I am not there.  These activities integrate him into our culture, and my world, and hopefully enhance his interest in my success while contributing to his learning.

That is the good news.  The bad news is, of course, that he will leave.  It is a fair trade-off, in my view, because now he will go back to his country and his life and I will have contributed to him, and he will have contributed to Accountability Pays.

Having been the fortunate recipient of such good work, I look back on my own experience of school and wish I had been that smart, to work for someone and get a flavor of reality.  The closest I have come is the International Collegiate Business Strategy Competition (ICBSU), which comes to San Diego thanks to host school University of San Diego for the last time in April, because of budget cuts. It is seeking a new host University, which may mean that I will no longer be involved, and that breaks my heart.  I am one of many “judges” while student executive teams run a business (simulation).  Judging means occupying the board of directors seat for these executive teams — great fun.

But I digress.  There are excellent internship programs in San Diego at all the universities.  Additionally, UC San Marcos has a program where you can hire a team of seniors for $1,500 to take on a project — research projects are common — and the results have been stunning!  I have not partaken myself, but several of my client companies have, with good results.