Legendary Management Expert and Bestselling Author
Ram Charan
Speaking Fee: $30,000 to $50,000
Travels From:
Ram Charan At A Glance:
Ram Charan is a highly acclaimed business advisor, speaker and author. Ram has coached some of the worlds’ most successful CEOs. For 35 years, he has worked behind the scenes at companies like GE, KLM, Bank of America, DuPont, Novartis, EMC, 3M, Linde and Verizon.
Ram Charan is a highly acclaimed business advisor, speaker and author. Ram has coached some of the worlds’ most successful CEOs. For 35 years, he has worked behind the scenes at companies like GE, KLM, Bank of America, DuPont, Novartis, EMC, 3M, Linde and Verizon.
Ram 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. He graduated from Harvard with high distinction and was a Baker Scholar. He then served on the Harvard Business School faculty. Ram cuts through the difficult problems and gets you to the right insights: he makes difficult problems simple with great insights.
Ram is known for his practical, real world perspective. His expertise runs deep in several areas of business:
* Organic Growth
* Succession & Leadership Pipeline
* Leadership
* Tools for Changing a Business Culture
* Corporate Governance
* Building Top Management Teams
* Execution: Discipline of Getting Things Done
* Business Acumen
* Culture of Innovation
* Managing in the Downturn
Ram is a favorite among executive educators. He has taught for 30 consecutive years at GE’s famous Crotonville Institute and is the recipient of their Bell Ringer award (best teacher). He won the Best Teacher Award at Wharton and Northwestern. He was among Business Week’s top ten resources for in-house executive development programs.
Ram is a well-known author, whose books include Execution, co-authored with Larry Bossidy, the former CEO of Honeywell. Execution reached number one on the Wall Street Journal list, and has been on the New York Time’s best-seller list for more than one hundred and fifty weeks. Ram’s other books include Boards That Deliver, What the CEO Wants You to Know, Boards at Work, Every Business Is a Growth Business, Profitable Growth, 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 and The Game Changer, co-authored with A.G. Lafley, Chairman and CEO of Proctor & Gamble. His forthcoming book, Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules of Getting Things Done in Difficult Times will be published in January 2009. In the Spring of 2009, his forth book on boards will be published Owing Up: Answering the 14 Questions Asked in Every Boardroom. He also tailors his books for specific client companies such as Gateway, Ford and EDS.
He’s written articles for Business Week, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Time, Information Week, Leader to Leader, Director’s Monthly, Directorship, The Corporate Board and USA Today.
Ram is a director of Austin Industries, The Six Sigma Academy and Tyco Electronics. He was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources in 2005. He serves as a co-host for the Fortune Forum on Corporate Governance and also serves on the National Association of Corporate Directors’ Blue Ribbon Commission on Corporate Governance. Ram is based in Dallas, Texas.
If you’d like to bring in Ram Charan as your next keynote speaker, please fill out the “Request More Information” form on the right.
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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 -
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. -
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. -
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.
