BUILDING POWER AND INFLUENCE: PERSONAL STRATEGIES
Even though cooperation and collaboration is valued in organizations, they remain inevitably hierarchical. Because aspiring leaders are challenged by the idea of power, this session will highlight the importance of getting comfortable with power, understanding the fundamentals of power dynamics, and developing one’s own path to power.

THE CEO AGENDA: TAKING CHARGE OF STRATEGY, GROWTH, AND CULTURE
Getting to senior executive positions requires an understanding of the CEO's agenda—how they measure their own success, how they spend their time, how they communicate with different audiences, and their temperament. This session will provide insights from successful CEOs of medium and large companies.

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION SKILLS
As a leader, you spend the majority of your time communicating with others. You probably don’t spend much time thinking about the way you do this, nor are you likely to get honest feedback on the way you communicate. Yet the quality of communication largely determines your effectiveness. This session will provide guidelines for improving your own communication style. In particular, we will focus on your persuasive skills — how to convince others to accept your ideas or support your position, even if they are skeptical at first.

THE CHALLENGE OF CHANGE
Why do successful companies lose their competitive edge? The answer is not obvious, for these companies have all the resources and capabilities to stay on top—financial, market, intellectual, and technological. To avoid this "success syndrome" managers must be effective at simultaneously managing incremental innovation as well as leading revolutionary or discontinuous change. The purpose of these two sessions is to explore how managers can balance the tension between the short- and long-term, with particular attention to the use of culture in their organizations as a potential source of competitive advantage—or disadvantage.