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John Canfield is an experienced business executive and coach who has successfully implemented planning, problem solving, creativity, and innovation processes in a wide variety of teams, organizations, industries, and cultures.
John has twenty-five years of experience speaking to a wide variety of audiences, from large conventions to executive board rooms. John has spoken to more than one thousand audiences around the world.
His clients include AT&T, Citibank, Deloitte & Touche, First USA, General Motors, Merck, and Underwriters Lab and thousands of participants of his many seminars and keynote speeches presented in North America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia.
John speaks with a sense of purpose and a sense of humor. Audiences enjoy John’s ability to read his audience, adjust the mood, raise the energy level, deliver a message, and end with a story to think about for weeks to come.
John is an instructor and consultant for Advanced Practical Thinking Training, The American Management Association, The Canadian Management Center, The American Supplier Institute, The Forum Corporation, General Electric Financial Services (Six Sigma Black Belt instructor), GOAL/QPC (Creative Thinking Skills), Grand Rapids Community College (creativity and innovation) International Quality and Productivity Center (Collaboration Skills) Leadership Strategies (Core Facilitator), Lean Enterprise Institute (leading Lean and Six Sigma improvement teams), Grand Rapids’ Right Place Program, Marcus Evans, and the Singapore Institute of Management.
John has earned a B.S. in Mechanical & Industrial Engineering from the University of Minnesota and a B.A. in Political Science and Psychology from Williams College.
Prior to 1990 John was a Senior Engineering Manager for Intel Corporation and later Director of Corporate Quality and Design Research for Herman Miller.
John is a popular columnist for Michigan Business News: www.mibiz.com/goodthinking.asp
TOPICS
The topics listed below are all about thinking, and learning to think more effectively and creatively, to solve problems, create new alternatives, and improve your company's performance..
Process Improvement: This topic’s strategy is to help work teams build and practice an effective problem solving methodology. Learn to improve processes throughout your organization by learning to identify and replace sources of waste with new value-added steps.
Strategic Planning: Learn to create an operational planning document that guides company leaders and employees, and improve the executive team's ability to identify, prioritize, and assign opportunities, and contribute to improved company performance.
Creative Thinking Skills: While there are many myths about creativity (creative people are always artists, or nerds, or not like you and me, etc.) a modern understanding of creativity recognizes techniques are available to assist anyone who knows how to use them. These techniques do not need to depend on a chance occurrence. These techniques can be used at will whenever individuals or teams recognize they need more ideas.
Scenario Planning – Consider Alternative Futures: The value of this technique comes from the deep dialogue that the different scenario stories provoke. The alternate views generate new insights about a company and their future. Thinking this way helps prepare the contributors to notice and consider emerging ideas before others even perceive any change.
Making Practical Use of Dr. de Bono's Six Thinking Hats - This topic helps individuals practice how to break out of their 'thinking ruts' using techniques found in Dr. Edward de Bono's landmark book, Six Thinking Hats. This is an excellent technique to suspend judgment while considering all of the aspects of an alternative before making a decision.
Lateral Thinking - Innovation With Approaches to Individual and Corporate Creativity
Developing breakthrough ideas does not have to be a shotgun effort. Dr. de Bono's proven lateral thinking tools provide a deliberate, systematic process that will result in more innovative thinking. This is a rigorous course designed for those looking for more innovation in strategic thinking, process improvement, or marketing.
Lateral Thinking is listed in the Oxford Dictionary: "A way of thinking which seeks solutions to intractable problems through unorthodox methods or elements which would normally be ignored by logical thinking." In self organizing information systems like our minds, patterns are formed. Lateral Thinking is a method for cutting across these patterns and changing concepts and perceptions. The goal of this seminar is to introduce leaders to the ideas, skills and processes that will help change the way your company's employees think.
Lateral Thinking is developed by Dr. Edward de Bono, regarded as the leading international authority in the field of conceptual thinking and also the teaching of thinking as a skill. John Canfield has been certified as an instructor for Dr. de Bono's Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking.
Project Management: Companies are learning that to remain competitive they must implement changes on an ongoing basis. Many of these companies are assigning functional and crossfunctional project teams to complete these changes in the least amount of time with limited resources. This topic provides an PMBOK-based overview of how to prepare your Project Managers to plan, manage, budget, track, and successfully complete company projects.
Leading Change: This topic introduces a sequence of exercises using new techniques to help you learn about and practice more effective ways to think about, and decide about, change and improvements This topic will help you feel and act more comfortably about change, help you handle change in a positive and productive way, and help you generate attractive alternatives about any change that comes your way.
Leading Teams: Learn to initiate and support your organization's improvement teams. This topic provides an overview of how to prepare your Leadership and Guidance Team, identify and prioritize your improvement team projects, prepare your improvement teams for their first and following meetings, use storyboards and quality improvement tools, identify and deal with team development issues, and monitor, support, and reward improvement teams.
Collaboration Skills - Resolving Conflict: Somewhere along the way we discover that others don’t always see things the same way we do. We seem to be in conflict. Conflict is in large part the emotional reaction we experience when we think a particular way. Sometimes conflict is disabling, preventing future progress. Sometimes conflict is laughable upon discovering a misunderstanding. This hands-on topic provides a number of exercises to help you develop approaches and skills that allow you to move past conflict and work more effectively, both in one-on-one relationships and group situations.
Leadership & Management Team Development: This meeting series provides management team members the opportunity to discuss how they would prefer to work together to achieve company goals. Taking full advantage of the "people support what they create" principle, these meetings are customized to help your team make the specific improvements that will help you now, and in the near and long term future. Each meeting is a very hands-on interactive series of exercises resulting in an assessment of a team's current situation, their goals, and a plan and schedule to bridge the gaps. One-on-one interviews and pre-work often precede this meeting.
Leading Innovation Teams: This presentation provides a series of hands-on exercises that introduces and practices the strategic and tactical tasks of an innovation project leader. Topics include: Systems, Strategies, and Processes, Prerequisite mindsets, and Innovation Teams - What Do They Do and How Do They Do it. The presentation ends with a consideration of your next 90 days leading your innovation initiative.
Leading an Innovative Organization: This presentation is intended for senior leaders who are or will be leading an organization that embraces innovation: The Innovation imperative - The problem - The guaranteed innovation system - Priority - Innovation platoons - Problem orientation - Platforms - Payback metrics - What to do tomorrow morning and every morning thereafter.
Effective Meetings: The primary results of meetings are decisions. Good meetings actively promote making good decisions. Good decisions are the basis of successful business. This topic is based on the fundamental idea that good results can only come from good processes. Good processes require an agreed-upon sequence of steps, ground rules, and meaningful feedback. Building and following an effective meeting process require skills which can be taught and developed.
Developing Meeting Facilitators: Build on-site, self sufficient meeting facilitators capable of supporting effective meetings company-wide. Most often follows strategic planning, scenario planning, problems solving, or creative thinking skills topics.
Waste Search - Process Redesign: Improve processes throughout your organization by learning to identify and replace sources of waste with new value-added steps. This hands-on topic presents and practices a variety of techniques focusing on waste elimination to improve processes while working on real company issues.
Culture & Behavior: Leaders use a structured technique to talk about the behaviors of their direct reports that do and do not contribute to company performance. The exercise results with an organization-specific list of promoting and restraining behaviors which become the standards for your organization’s preferred leadership behaviors.
Meeting Facilitation: An effective meeting facilitator serves as an unbiased, proactive, skilled helper focused on improving the process and performance of the team they support. Enlisting an effective meeting facilitator is a selective investment strategy to improve your business results. A skilled meeting facilitator helps the client meet their goals efficiently and effectively. A skilled meeting facilitator can reduce your total meeting time and cost by reducing confusion and reluctance while promoting open discussion, problem solving, and decision making.
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