Dan Coughlin

Dan Coughlin is a leading authority on managing for long-term business success.

His client list is a who’s who of some of the world’s best-known companies including McDonald’s, Toyota, Marriott, Coca-Cola, GE, Subway, Abbott, Prudential, Jack in the Box, AT&T, Kiewit Construction, Holder Construction, Boeing, St. Louis Cardinals, and more than 150 other organizations. He has also worked with hundreds of small business owners in groups such as the Ace Hardware Platinum Performers Conference, National Automobile Dealers Association, National Tooling and Machining Association, and Restoration Industry Association.

Since 1998 he has invested over 3,000 hours on-site as a management consultant observing and advising executives and managers in a wide variety of business functions and in more than fifty industries. As an Executive Coach, he has provided more than 1,500 coaching sessions for presidents, vice-presidents, and senior directors in Fortune 500 companies, major privately-owned firms, and small businesses. He and his clients constantly work to hone simple processes that will improve performance throughout their organizations.

As a keynote speaker and seminar leader from Maui to Budapest and everywhere in between, Dan Coughlin is one of America’s most practical business teachers. He combines real-life stories from his management consulting work with in-depth research of the audience. He then delivers penetrating and practical insights that attendees can use immediately to achieve sustainable improvement in their business performance and results.

In his keynote presentations and seminars, Dan Coughlin focuses on three critical management topics: leadership, innovation, and branding. Attendees consistently say they appreciate the usefulness of Dan’s ideas, the way he customizes his remarks for their group, and the simple, down-to-earth, and humorous way in which he delivers them.

As a business thought leader on generating sustainable, profitable growth, Dan Coughlin has written management books which include:

Find a Way to Win: Management Insights from Terry Michler, America’s All-Time Winningest Soccer Coach (2010, foreword by Marshall Goldsmith)

The Management 500: A High-Octane Formula for Business Success (2009, foreword by Jason Jennings)

Accelerate: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Business Momentum (2007), which made it to #4 on Barnes & Noble’s Business Bestseller List.

Corporate Catalysts: How to Make Your Company More Successful, Whatever Your Title, Income, or Authority (2005), which was translated for both China and India.

Quoted in USA Today, the New York Times, Investor’s Business Daily, The Journal of the American Management Association, and dozens of other publications, Dan Coughlin’s articles have been published in more than 100 trade association publications.

Dan Coughlin’s experience as a keynote speaker includes:

• GE Capital Leadership Conference
• The Prudential Forum International Conference
• Toyota Financial Services National Sales Conference
• Abbott Laboratories Global Regulatory Conference
• McDonald’s National Leadership Council
• Jack in the Box International Conference
• Boeing St. Louis Leadership Association Annual Conference
• Marriott International Sales & Marketing Western Region Conference
• Ace Hardware Platinum Performers Conference
• Denny’s Franchisee Association International Conference
• Kiewit Construction Leadership Conference
• Holder Construction Leadership Conference
• BMC Software International Sales Managers Conference
• Jiffy Lube Association of Franchisees Annual Conference
• SolidWorks International Sales Conference
• Bodycote Global Sales Conference
• Shawnee Mission Medical Center Board & Management Retreat
• Trimble Partner International Conference
• Parker Drilling International Conference
• Many, many more

Organizations from large to small need effective leaders at all levels to achieve and sustain success. In this high-energy, high-impact session, Dan Coughlin explains the key leadership actions necessary to influence the decisions people make. Based on his 3,000 hours of on-site executive coaching in over 30 industries, he debunks the traditional myths of leadership and shows how any employee can impact the way other people think and drive better sustainable business results.

Customers don’t care which department was most successful. They only care about the value the departments deliver collectively to them. Leaders create more value for customers by effectively influencing divergent individuals to support a common cause. Dan explains how every leadership style can be effective, except for the dreaded chameleon and the polite dictator. He shows how preserving your integrity supports long-term business success.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn The 4 Critical Leadership Questions and how your answers can sustain high performance throughout your organization.
• Learn seven ways to influence what other people think about.
• Learn how to effectively give candid feedback to employees about poor performances and still maintain a strong working relationship with them.
• Learn how to leverage your values, strengths, and passions as an individual to effectively create greater value for your organization and your customers.
• Learn how to maintain the genuine, daily, and purpose-driven enthusiasm necessary to guide a lasting impact in your organization.
• Learn how effective collaboration can become the highest form of business acceleration.
• Learn the seven questions in The Performance Bar-Raising Process.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin’s 30-Day Leadership Action Guide that will help him or her convert the ideas from this session into a personalized plan of immediate action upon returning to work.

A business innovation is the creation of additional value for customers that they will pay for at a profitable margin to the organization. It has to be both: new value that the customer does not already have and a profit-generator for the business. One without the other is insufficient.

Dan Coughlin demystifies the process of innovation, and makes it simple, clear, and practical. He explains that innovation is about creating and delivering greater value for other people with more appropriate values based on a better understanding of them.

He shows how every employee can generate breakthrough ideas to increase efficiency, improve execution, and boost the bottom-line. From scheduling thinking time to using the observation tower to using OPS (Other People’s Successes), audience members will walk away with ideas they can use immediately to begin to generate powerful innovations.

Dan explains how successful business innovators boldly walk away from a lot of good ideas so they can focus on a few great ideas. He explains the importance of prototyping to save time and money. If you want your organization to propel itself beyond today’s performance level to generate sustainable, profitable growth, this is a must-attend session.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn the Five Myths of Innovation and why innovation is a necessary daily activity.
• Learn the five steps in The Process of Innovation and how the creation of value is based on carefully studying your desired customers.
• Learn why the most important step in business is to step back and think.
• Learn how to master the four phases in The Cycle of Innovation that produce a steady flow of profit-generating ideas for sustained excellence.
• Learn how to find the profit-generating gap between a customer’s expectations and desires.
• Learn to schedule thinking and non-thinking time and how they drive innovations month after month.
• Learn how sacrifice accelerates innovation and why “N” and “O” are the most important letters in i-n-n-o-v-a-t-i-o-n.
• Learn how to find organizations that have matching definitions with yours and how they provide a steady stream of ideas for improving your performance.
• Learn to study Centers of Excellence and how to extract useful ideas from them for your organization.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin’s 30-Day Innovation Action Guide that will help him or her convert the ideas from this session into a personalized plan of immediate action upon returning to work.

Your brand is your reputation in the marketplace. Your brand is the value that customers think they receive when they buy from your organization or potential customers think they will receive if they do buy from your organization. Your brand is not what you want to be. It’s what customers and potential customers believe you are right now.

Dan Coughlin, who has worked with such great brands as Toyota, McDonald’s, Marriott, GE, Coca-Cola, Prudential, Subway, Ace Hardware, Jack in the Box, Boeing, Kiewit, and the St. Louis Cardinals, provides penetrating insights into the dos and don’ts of building the brand you want. He explains the importance of defining and owning a performance category that matters deeply to customers and will generate the financial outcomes your organization desires.

He walks the audience through the importance of a brand audit and the steps necessary to complete it successfully. He demonstrates how an obsession with undisciplined experimentation can ruin a brand and destroy the sustainable, profitable growth of an organization.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn to see the equity in value and values.
• Learn The Wagon Wheel Approach to Strategic Planning that guides every spoke in your business into a central hub of value for your customers.
• Learn the long-term financial strength in sustained, value-added relationships.
• Learn what your brand is, where it exists, and how you can strengthen it.
• Learn how long it takes to build a brand and why a sustained, consistent effort is critical to success.
• Learn to leverage a brand audit to strengthen decision-making throughout your organization.
• Learn the importance of staying true to what got your organization to where it is today and why good business leaders are good historians.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin’s 30-Day Branding Action Guide that will help him or her convert the ideas from this session into a personalized plan of immediate action upon returning to work.