3/12/08   Dov Seidman

How Means Everything
Strong, principled organizations will win the future by literally out-behaving the competition.

Now that customers, competitors, regulators, and advocacy groups have unprecedented visibility into organizations and their operations, how businesses do things is as important as what they do. Reputation has become a primary differentiator among companies, locally as well as globally.

"Strong, principled organizations will win the future by literally out-behaving the competition," says Dov Seidman, whose company advises more than 250 companies about how to do just that.

With example after example drawn from his broad experience, Seidman will convince you of the truth of what he is saying and show you what it takes to build and sustain an inspiring culture where everyone in the organization makes business decisions based on shared values.

From this session, you will learn, among other things, how to:

• Play to your strengths in building your best reputation.
• Spot reputational problem areas, understand them, and fix them.
• Unlock "should" as the proper guide to everyone's behavior.
• Avoid the small lapses that can have huge costs.
• Earn a second chance if things go wrong.
• Lead an organization to complete congruence between what it believes and how it behaves.

Dov Seidman holds degrees in philosophy from UCLA, politics and economics from Oxford, and law from Harvard. He started his company, LRN, thirteen years ago in his living room, and it now has over 200 employees serving clients that include Johnson & Johnson, Trump Entertainment, The New York Times, and Raytheon. Himself the author of How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything (In Business and In Life), Seidman is quoted extensively in Thomas Friedman's bestseller, The World Is Flat.

Seidman Says (From his appearance on "The Charlie Rose Show"):

"Reputation, this amorphous, soft thing, today is becoming our hardest currency in terms of getting ahead. It precedes us before we go anywhere, and people make decisions based on what they think our reputation is. . . It's a matter of thinking not in terms of what you can and can't do, but what you should and shouldn't do. . . A company's reputation can no longer be manufactured by what the company says about itself; it results from what others say about the company."

"Information today is like a toddler: It goes everywhere, gets into everything, and can't be controlled. In a connected world, those who make powerful connections win. . . Companies used to be like fortresses - today we're more like people in a stadium, who all can see each other."

To Learn More about Dov Seidman and his company, LRN, go to www.lrn.com.