Reindeer Economics: Collaboration on the Fly
Working together - collaboratively - is neither natural nor easy, especially for independent minded reindeer...uh, I mean consultants. Through a short series of learnings, conversations, and flight school practice, we will find the benefits of pulling together result in a brighter red nose :-) and more grain for all.
Susan deGrandpré and Geoff Lamdin will kick off and facilitate fun interaction that has a serious point: collaboration is a strategy that consultants must use to thrive.
Susan deGrandpre: Owner of Collaboration Consulting, helps a wide variety of organizations operate more productively through collaborating
for success. Building on a long leadership and consulting career, she has been in private practice since 1999.
She deeply believes that every leader and employee has the capacity to be a highly valuable contributor to the workplace. When collaboration processes are clear, supportive and direct, that capacity translates into reality and the organization thrives. When collaboration is muddled, the organization fails.
When you collaborate for; success, you will:
• Anticipate and exceed customer expectations
• Spend fewer training dollars by using the talent already in your organization
• Improve productivity by improving employee input
• Install great collaboration as a primary strategy to compete in a challenging economy
Susan is the Vice-President of ACE.
Geoff Lamdin: An opportunity engineer for over 24 years, Geoff Lamdin, Owner of Left Field Solutions, has been catalyzing, facilitating and
fostering innovation. He has been making connections and solving complex problems for clients. He can bring experience and expertise to take a company from ideation through implementation and commercialization. Geoff often brings "left field" solutions to meet business and community needs. He is co-founder and Chair of SeaChange Group LLC, a new fuels company and a co-founder of Introspective Systems, a Top Gun alumnus and computational intelligence software company in the architecture and design industry.
Additionally, consulting clients have ranged from local sustainable development to large renewable energy projects; from the Vendee Globe to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Teams and Shaklee U.S.
Geoff has been a mentor for the Maine Center for Entrepreneur Development’s Top Gun program for four years, has participated in the Innovation Engineering Leadership Institute and is the Immediate Past President and Chair of the Program Committee of ACE.
Roundtable
Takes place from 9:45 to 10:30 after the regular meeting and is optional
Life is a Project– How Are you Managing?
Jim Milliken: We walk backwards into the future. We enter each day confident it will be pretty much like yesterday, and we expect the same tomorrow. Then some traumatic interruption horrifies us, or maybe the accumulation of some acceptable annoyance arrives at critical mass. And everything changes. We can be paralyzed with horror. Maybe driven by impulse into some behavior that makes it all worse.
More routinely, along our way we gather perceptions of the need or desirability of changing direction, seeking and building new relationships, exploring new possibilities . . . but the needs and bright shiny distractions of the moment occupy our days. We never get to that hilltop we once glimpsed through the busyness of our lives. Motivation sags under the weight of a thousand quick little decisions. We coulda been a contendah, but then it’s too late.
This workshop will provide a kit of handy tools for the busy professional to use to establish a balanced personal methodology for managing daily priorities that include appropriate provision for risk and for progress in building a new future.
Jim Milliken opened his consultancy 25 years ago this month. He specializes in leadership, management, work load productivity and communication skills for managers and professionals. He presents an eight-day series of Project Management courses several times a year through USM’s Professional Development & Training Center. Other current and upcoming training topics are Change Management, Business Writing, Grammar, Delegating Skills and Mastering Multiple Projects, Priorities & Demands.
His consulting clients have included organizations in the fields of healthcare, law, law enforcement, engineering, construction, marine trades, industrial materials, manufacturing, IT and education. He also has taught university courses in Project Management, Dispute Resolution, Leadership, Advertising and Journalism, and is certified as a Quality Matters Master Reviewer for online college courses.
Jim's first career as a newspaper reporter, editor and manager included a brief stint at the Portland Press Herald and nine years at the Kennebec Journal. Jim blogs regularly at jimmillikenproject.blogspot.com. His website is MillikenProject.com.
The A.C.E. regular meeting has networking, a buffet breakfast and a speaker. Guests are welcome.
Registrations are required by December 19, 2012. If you want to be included on the registration list at the meeting then you need to register by the due date.
You can pay online by credit card (Visa, MasterCard or Discover NOT AMERICAN EXPRESS!) or mail a check to:
A.C.E.
110 Marginal Way #142
Portland ME 04101
If you are mailing a check, please register here so the system can track the registrants for us. Thanks!
Members: the $22 fee only works if you pay in advance. At the door, it is $28.
