Dan Coughlin

 About

About Dan Coughlin - Author and Inspiring, Practical Speaker on Leading for Sustainable, Profitable Growth

Dan Coughlin is a leading authority on managing for long-term business success. He teaches The Any Person Mindset, a practical management approach for improving individual, group, and organizational performance in a sustainable way. It is based on his core belief that any person can make a significant difference in an organization, but no one is born with the traits necessary to make a significant difference. These are learned thinking traits.

His client list includes McDonald's, Toyota, Marriott, BJC HealthCare, Coca-Cola, GE, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shell Oil, RE/MAX, Subway, Abbott, Prudential, Boeing, Cisco Systems, American Cancer Society, and the St. Louis Cardinals. Since 1998 he has worked with more than 200 organizations. 

As a management consultant, keynote speaker, executive coach, and seminar leader, he works with executives and managers to improve their impact as business leaders. His focus is on helping these individuals in the areas of leadership, innovation, and branding in order to generate better sustainable, profitable growth for their organizations. 

Dan 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 2,500 coaching sessions for presidents, vice-presidents, and senior directors in Fortune 500 companies, major privately-owned firms, and small businesses. As a keynote speaker and seminar leader, he has made more than 500 presentations to corporate audiences. He does in-depth research on every audience before customizing his presentation to meet their needs.

Quoted in USA Today, 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. He is the author of the book, The Management 500: A High-Octane Formula for Business Success. 

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 Topics

What Dan Coughlin Talks About:

Accelerate Your Impact as a Significant Difference-Maker
It’s time for a sea change in management. We need to move away from the 80/20 Rule where only 20% of the people are believed capable of delivering 80% of the results. In order to flourish as organizations we need to move to the 80 + 20 Rule, where 100% of employees are believed capable of helping the organization to succeed. 

Can any employee truly make a significant difference in a business? In this highly interactive, high-impact session, Dan Coughlin explains why the answer is a resounding yes when you apply The Any Person Mindset, which says any person can make a significant difference in an organization, but no one is born with the traits necessary to do so. These are learned traits. The basis of every great organization is to help every employee make a significant difference in helping the organization to succeed.

Based on his 3|000 hours of on-site observing and advising of executives and managers in over forty industries and on the more than 2|500 Executive Coaching sessions he has provided, Coughlin shows how any employee can help to drive better sustainable business results.

Learning Objectives:

  • See the enormous impact of value and values.
  • Understand how any person can operate at the intersection of greatness.
  • Learn why scheduling thinking and non-thinking time is critical to long-term success.
  • Think about how you think to see how your thoughts affect your emotions, work relationships, performance, results, and your organization’s brand.
  • How to maintain the genuine, daily, and purpose-driven enthusiasm necessary to guide a lasting impact in your organization.
  • How to let your imagination flow effectively.
  • Retain your ability to choose how to deal with major changes.
  • How to improve performance by using The Continually Raise Your Performance Bar Process.
  • How to increase genuine employee engagement throughout the organization.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin’s Significant Difference-Maker 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.

Deliver Excellence by Design
Excellence is THE business strategy for the world’s greatest companies.

Excellence is about performance and process. You have to deliver excellence at the highest level in your industry to generate sustainable, profitable growth. You get there by doing the best you are capable of doing as an organization each day while simultaneously learning how to be better the next day. Patience. Incrementalism, Resilience. Passion. Sustainability. Long-term thinking. No shortcuts. These are the characteristics of companies that deliver excellence by design. You get there by doing it intentionally.

In this extremely thought-provoking and interactive session, Dan Coughlin shares practical insights he has learned from working with executives at companies that have delivered excellence for decades: Boeing, Toyota, Shell, GE, Coca-Cola, RE/MAX, McDonald’s, Abbott, Prudential, American Cancer Society, and the St. Louis Cardinals.

Learning Objectives:

  • How to deliver excellence in value every day.
  • How to sacrifice for the sake of excellence.
  • Understand the psychology of results and avoid the emotional roller coaster of attaching your self-worth to your outcomes.
  • Understand how your thoughts about past events affect the future of your organization’s brand.
  • Understand the Five Myths of Innovation and why innovation is a necessary daily activity. 
  • Know the four steps in The Process of Innovation and how the creation of value is based on carefully studying your desired customers. 
  • See how to search for hot spots of too much value or too little value for your customers in current products and services. A hot spot is the starting point of a new innovation.
  • Leverage conversations, observations, experiences, and connections to improve performance. 
  • Realize the power of iterating and eliminating existing products and services.
  • 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 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 Delver Excellence by Design 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. 

Lead to Build Teamwork that Delivers Sustainable Success
Many business groups are not teams. They’re a collection of silos. Teamwork happens when individuals support one another toward achieving meaningful objectives. This requires focused collaborative effort and open, honest, and respectful communication over the long term. At the heart of debilitating communication is a lack of respect for other members of the group.

Leadership is influencing how other people think so they make decisions that improve results in a sustainable way. Coughlin explains practical ways to lead in any size organization. Based on his 3|000 hours of on-site observing and advising of executives in over forty industries and on the more than 2|500 Executive Coaching sessions he has provided, 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.

Dan Coughlin has worked closely with business teams in more than forty industries and interviewed more than 1|000 people to understand what they feel makes their organization effective and ineffective. He has seen the disciplined, selfless attitude necessary to win consistently in a constantly changing marketplace as well as the multiple issues and drama that bubble up from self-centered behaviors that ruin business performances.

Learning Objectives:

  • Determine a cause that resonates more than individual rewards.
  • Establish who is going to do what when and why that is going to happen.
  • Understand how effective collaboration can become the highest form of business acceleration.
  • Answer the 4 Critical Leadership Questions and see how your answers can sustain high performance throughout your organization.
  • Understand eight ways to influence how other people think.
  • How to effectively give candid feedback to employees about poor performances and still maintain a strong working relationship with them.
  • Identify four ways to respond to a co-worker and see why three of them lower employee engagement and one truly engages the other person.
  • Use the five approaches of effective communication that build stronger working relationships.
  • Avoid the five approaches of ineffective communication that ruin working relationships.
  • Clarify your communication needs and meet the communication needs of your team members.
  • Know you are unlikely to change at your core, and know it is impossible for you to change anyone else.
  • Be aware of and accept your strengths and passions and the strengths and passions of other people.
  • Don’t resent differences in other people, leverage them.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin’s Lead to Deliver Sustainable Results 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.

Strengthen Your Organization’s Brand for Long-Term Greatness
There are two ways to build a brand: from the outside-in and from the inside-out. 

Positioning the value of the brand in the minds of people outside of your organization is tremendously important. Strengthening the ability of the people inside the organization to deliver value is equally important. 

Your organization’s brand is like a person. It needs to be fed intelligently every day in order to stay healthy for long-term success. In this session you will learn practical ways to feed your brand every day to differentiate your organization in the marketplace. A great brand is a magnet that attracts people who want to buy from your organization. When your brand is strong, it makes selling exponentially easier. When your brand is weak, it makes selling exponentially harder. Your brand is the value customers think they receive when buying from your organization. It is also the value potential customers think they will receive if they do buy from your organization. Your brand is not what you want your organization to be. It’s what customers and potential customers believe you are right now.

Dan Coughlin, who has worked with executives at such great brands as Toyota, McDonald’s, Marriott, GE, Coca-Cola, Subway, RE/MAX, Jack in the Box, Shell, Abbott Laboratories, Prudential, 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 demonstrates how an obsession with undisciplined experimentation can ruin a brand and destroy the sustainable, profitable growth of an organization.

Learning Objectives: 

  • Understand thirteen brand-feeding approaches you can use today. (Just don’t try to use all of them each day.)
  • Establish how to differentiate your organization by answering the question, “Why us?”
  • Use The Wagon Wheel Approach that guides every spoke in your business into a central hub of value for your customers.
  • Realize the long-term financial strength in sustained, value-added relationships.
  • Clearly define what your brand is and what it is not.
  • See how long it takes to build a brand and why a sustained, consistent effort is critical to success.
  • Leverage a brand audit to strengthen decision-making throughout your organization.
  • Value the importance of staying true to what got your organization to where it is today and understand why good business leaders are good historians.
  • Learn how your thoughts about your organization affect the way your customers and prospects view your brand.

Every attendee will receive a copy of Dan Coughlin’s 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.

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 Recent Publications

Dan Coughlin hits the mark with practical insights and tools to help you be a more effective leader. His presentation enlightened and inspired our members to accelerate their impact as leaders. Dan tailored his presentation to the group which made his lessons relevant and actionable

McDonald's National Leadership Council

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