Types of Services

For corporations, Bob does a lot of presentations for management groups, customer appreciations events, strategic planning sessions, and training sessions. The topics are of the type cited below. Also, he does a lot of industry association keynote presentations and panels.

On the advisory front, Bob often works with individual executives on particular operational, strategic, or profitability problems, often playing the role of an experienced sounding board and advisor.

Bob has extensive experience in tackling profitability problems and developing a strategy to getting costs under control and innovation revitalized. He also has deep experience in marketing, having been the Senior VP of all marketing activities at Procter and Gamble for 5 years. He has a wealth of experience in the information technology area, having served as a CIO at P&G and having the Microsoft IT Division reporting to him for 7 years.

Topics

The following provides descriptions of some of the presentations, training, and advisory work Bob Herbold has provided groups in recent years. To discuss the possibility of Bob providing a presentation, a training session or advising an executive or a group, click here.

Strangled By Complexity? Ten Principles that Lead to Operational and Innovative Excellence - Many of us have experienced the frustration of being in an organization where you feel strangled by the complexity and difficulty of getting things done. You are very clear about what needs to happen, but at every turn, you run into needless procedural formalities, endless meetings and e-mails, incompatible systems, time-consuming and debilitating concurrence requirements, and innovation-ravaging consensus decision making.

Sometimes it’s due to operational problems such as old, patched-together, complicated systems and processes, bloated bureaucracy, or outdated and fragmented business practices. Often the organization has talented operational personal, but they have too many of them and they have no authority or motivation to simplify and streamline. Instead, they add complexity every day and the result is that it is frustratingly hard to get things done.

Such complexity also typically leads to a lack of product innovation, an outdated business model, and missed technology or consumer trends. While the organization may have a solid R&D staff and plenty of smart people, somehow bright ideas never seem to become a reality.

In this presentation we focus on ten courageous principles that that are a roadmap for leading an organization to operate in a lean and agile manner and grow via innovation. For each of the ten principles, we provide several specific suggested actions and provide detailed case studies of actual companies to demonstrate the power of these actions and the implications of not doing these things.

Success Traps: How to Avoid Them – This presentation is particularly useful to groups that have been fairly successful in the past and are relatively stable, but are having some difficulty dealing with issues such as a change in the competitive landscape, new technology, new customer needs or simply the natural evolution of an industry. Here is a summary:

When an organization or an individual experiences a meaningful level of success or a period of stability, they tend to believe that continued success into the future is an entitlement. In many cases, they become complacent, comfortable, and bloated, when, in fact, what they should be doing is building upon all the things they have done well in the past, probing to uncover fresh approaches, improving their products and services, and staying lean and agile. This leads to several dangerous business traps that can cause serious problems. Unfortunately, the business pages are filled with sad stories of once successful organizations that, after reaching the top, could not keep it going; could not sustain their success.

It is important to realize that this happens to both individuals and organizations. Some of those organizations can be huge companies, and they succumb to the perils of success just the way individuals can.

This presentation discusses the human behaviors that cause the complacency and the resulting business traps that cause havoc. Most importantly, numerous approaches are discussed for dealing with these problems or preventing them from ever happening in the first place.

Courage: The Key to Leadership - This presentation is all about the need for leaders to face reality and deal with it. That requires tremendous courage.

We begin with detailed discussions of IBM and Porsche and how each of these companies got incredibly close to bankruptcy because the leadership did not have the courage to face reality and make some very tough decisions. Each of these companies was saved by a strong leader that was inserted at the eleventh hour.

We go into details about several other companies such as BP, Bayer, and Apple and review the power of properly communicating with the troops about reality and taking action, putting fresh talent in key jobs, and how to create a culture that consistently tackles the future rather than being run over by it.

Fiefdoms and Silos: What to Do About Them – With time, organizations seem to get into the rut of being overstaffed, bureaucratic, consensus oriented and fragmented. As a result of the fragmentation, the many individual units and divisions strive to be a independent as possible and typically become impenetrable fiefdoms and the whole organization becomes very slow to respond to anything.

This presentation begins with a description of how things had gotten so complicated and fragmented at Microsoft in the early to mid 1990’s that it was almost impossible to close the books at the end of the quarter and produce the necessary financial numbers for Wall Street. We then cover an example from Procter and Gamble and how Sam Walton himself had to confront the company in 1988 and demand that their bureaucratic sales practices be dismantled.

We then step back and discuss the three human behaviors that cause these kinds of bureaucratic practices, complexity and fiefdoms to emerge. We then review the steps that can be executed to avoid these kinds of problem, achieve industry-leading efficiency and agility, while also increasing the innovative output of the organization. This presentation can be adapted to be meaningful to just about any industry or geography. Also, the messages are very relevant to non-profits, government agencies, and educational institutions.

Achieving both Discipline and Innovation – This presentation was given to the World Innovation Forum in May, 2006. To read a summary of this talk provided by the World Innovation Forum, click here.

Increasing the Innovative Potential of Your Organization – This presentation is designed to help organizations develop ways to substantially increase the creative and innovative output of there organization. Here is a summary:

We begin this presentation with a review of the human behaviors that set in as an organization matures, and discuss how those behaviors dampen creativity and diffuse the sense of urgency in the organization. We then get into the specific recommendations of how to tackle the problem. For example, when it comes to cultivating creativity, nothing catches people’s attention like reorganizing them and clearly stating their new responsibilities. It’s also very important to dismantle “layers of wisdom” decision-making, where many levels of the organization get involved in a final decision, potentially watering down unique ideas and slowing up the process. Also, we discuss the pitfalls of consensus decision making and excessive use of teams when trying to generate innovation.

We also review several other approaches for fostering creativity, such as avoiding pre-judgment of people, eliminating unnecessary training and communications, focusing on the customer’s needs rather than on meetings and memos, and ensuring that individuals who deliver creativity and innovation are properly rewarded. With each of these recommendations, we provide detailed examples showing the problem, the approach, and the resulting impact.

Dangerous Marketing Traps and How to Avoid Them – his presentation is full of useful tips for marketing and sales personnel, as well as the management team of any business unit. Numerous case studies are provided, demonstrating the serious business problems that can emerge via falling prey to the various traps that exist in the marketing area.

The three primary areas of focus in this presentation are: 1) the need for a marketing strategy statement that is clear, concise, and distinctive; 2) the constant need for attention to details and excellence of execution of the marketing strategy and plans; and 3) the need, on an on-going basis, for the marketing to be relevant. In each of these areas marketing organizations constantly fall into traps that lead to no-motivating marketing and marketplace mediocrity. We discuss those traps in detail and how to avoid them.

The K-12 Establishment is Putting America’s Industrial Leadership at Risk – There are some very worrisome trends in the United States with respect to our global share of science, technology, engineering and mathematics expertise.  It is decreasing significantly, both at the bachelor’s level and at the Ph.D. level.  In this presentation, Herbold provides the basic data that shows those trends, the reasons behind them, the attendant risks and a recommended solution. Herbold was the chairman of the education subcommittee of the President’s Council for Science and Technology Policy from 2001 thru 2008. Click here for the complete text of the article that appeared in the Imprimis speech digest of Hillsdale College.

Does the U.S. Realize It’s in Competition – Living half time in Asia for the last three years has taught me that many countries around the world are tightly focused on competing with other countries for energy resources and global talent, as well as creating a solid financial foundation for their country and an attractive environment for multi-national companies to run their businesses. Unfortunately, in my opinion, very few people in the U.S., and even fewer in Washington DC, seem to realize this. In this presentation, Herbold provides robust example of the aggressiveness of various countries to build a very sound economic base and to continually strengthen their education systems and fine-tune thier tax structures to attack global companies to reside there. For the full text of the article on this topic which Herbold published in The Business Journal, click here.