The Creativity Studio

It begins with a conversation. Tell me about your communication challenges. It might be about just you — or it could be about positioning your company.

My bet is that I think differently than you do. That can be challenging, but ultimately, I think it can be very rewarding. It can result in establishing a new direction with better results.

I like the sense of entering a creative space together… a “studio” where we can generate communication excellence.

Find Your Edge

Every interaction needs an edge to make it memorable and actionable. It can change your audience from passive to active, your listeners from spectators to participants. Communication without an edge risks becoming lost in the gray fog of corporate mumbo jumbo. I hate corporate mumbo jumbo.

Free Your Message

I help business leaders free their messages from:

  • Corporate Speak: Eliminating the same stuff you have been reading for years

  • Competitor Comparison: Defining your own unique space and voice

  • Management Disconnect: Truly aligning with your audience

  • Loss of Focus: Bringing absolute clarity to your vision

  • Lack of Spark: Finding that one concept that forms an Ah Ha! moment

I have led teams and full companies through complete rebrands, designed very unique customer connections, overhauled boardroom strategy decks, motivated teams on the factory floor, written and delivered keynotes and much much more.

Now I  want to get more specific.

The Target: Your Next One-Issue Challenge

I am not looking for massive, long-term consulting contracts. Hire a major agency or a traditional consulting group for your big project work.

Turn to me to solve that one specific message challenge keeping you up at night. I focus on smaller, targeted issues that need the creative spark of a fresh, seasoned perspective to give you a definitive edge.

I know you may be tempted to just hand your challenge to AI and let Claude work it out. People receiving your message will most likely know you did that … and not appreciate it.

Let's Talk

Spend 30 minutes with me on a free introductory call. I’ll give you a straightforward opinion on whether or not I can help.

Submit this project form and I will personally be in touch.

Find Your Edge

Free Your Message

Just News and Updates Please

Just a few examples of my background and outlook

I Admire Your Slide Hygiene

Dr. Arno Penzias (born April 26, 1933, Munich, Germany—died January 22, 2024, San Francisco, California, U.S.) was a German American astrophysicist who shared one-half of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics with Robert Woodrow Wilson for their discovery of a faint electromagnetic radiation throughout the universe. Their work validated the Big Bang Theory.

I was honored to have Dr. Penzias on the board of a company I was managing. In one board meeting, Dr. Penzias had not said a word over the three hour duration of the meeting. When I asked for any summary statements at the end of the meeting, Arno raised his hand and simply said, “I admire your slide hygiene.”

It was one of the proudest moments in my management career.

I Love Public Speaking

Psychology Today Magazine once wrote that public speaking was the number one fear of interviewees in a large survey. Death was number two!

Luckily, I had Professor Cecil Stackpole for my course in speaking at GMI. Picture Ted Baxter in the Mary Tyler Moore show and you can hear Professor Stackpole in action. (Old school reference there!) He taught me how to prepare and deliver a speech.

Over the years I decided I enjoyed it — and so I did. I developed ways to distill a thousand disjointed thoughts into a cohesive presentation in which one thought led to the next building inside a three-part structure that works for nearly every talk you will ever have to give.

Nothing better than to receive a call from someone I helped telling me their speech
went great!

You’re the Best with Bad News

I was managing a manufacturing business in the midst of a three-year turnaround. Each quarter I went before the Board of a holding company that owned 4 other businesses. I waited my turn to present as each of the other 4 presented glowing results, year over year double digit EBITDAs and strong revenue growth strategies. Then I had to get up and talk about the bad news bears grinding out yet another quarter of losses.

But I got good at it. I developed a Challenge-Solution-Implementation cadence that gave the Board an honest, straightforward look at our progress and solid estimates on the timing of a positive outcome. At the end of one of those meetings a Board member put his arm around me and said, “Let me tell you something. No one delivers bad news better than you do.” I wear that statement as a badge of honor to this day.

Our New Hire Turnover is Horrible

“The number of new hires that wash out after working with us for just a week is really disturbing,” a CEO told me recently. “People just don’t want to work anymore.”

First, I believe people do want to work and do not want to wash out. Second, I believe there is a way to reduce that churn by concentrating on what happens during the first four hours of a new employee’s first day. Specifically, you should focus on four things:

  • A Sense of Belonging: Joining something bigger than themselves.

  • Understanding WHY You Are in Business: Hint—it is not just to make products.

  • Seeing a Connection With the Community: Assuming your business has one.

  • True Mentorship: Receiving guidance from solid people on your team.

See more in the GBC Webinar Examples.

OK… Maybe 3 Years

I am investing a lot of my time in understanding how AI is moving through our companies and what we need to do to harness its power rather than becoming victims of it. I think 3 years is our window.

First, I see giant opportunities to run counter to the “AI-ing” of everything by developing really human ways to communicate its application.

Second, I know people will need to think through its introduction. Done correctly, AI will become a very useful tool to allow the redirection of human work to higher value outcomes. Done poorly, it has the potential to simply accelerate or magnify the bad practices you currently have in place and to eliminate years of knowledge that can differentiate you in the marketplace.

I am developing AI leader partnerships to stay current with this industrial revolution.

You Made This Event Personal

There is nothing I enjoy more than being part of a team putting on a really large product introduction event. I have helped design and manage several. The challenge is to simultaneously make the event grand in scale and personal in execution. How do you make a member of a one thousand person audience feel personally engaged? How do you give people a way to physically interact with the new hardware and software you are rolling out? How do you create a common shared experience that will be remembered for many years to come?

In one event, we put every dealer principal in a NASCAR cup car and raced them around the California Speedway. In another, we projected an introduction movie on a 90 ft wide screen. In a third, we summarized the President’s speech, by filming from overhead, a group of hands around an after-dinner table. One set of hands slowly carved an engine out of a piece of cheese cake. Ask me, I can tell you more.