The Sweeney Agency

About Art Turock - Expert on Strategic Innovation and Change:

Art Turock helps businesses conceive strategic innovations that produce sustainable sales growth. Since 1985 Art has been working with corporations and associations to help them be more successful. Today, his focus is on working with people to develop their innovative thinking capability to add to their analytic thinking as part of their skill set.

His ideas have been featured in USA Today, The One-Minute Manager series, Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work, Success Magazine, Association Management, Bloomberg News, and CNN. His keynote speeches, seminars, strategic innovation consultations, site visits to trend-setting businesses, and 200 executive interviews annually, produce constant interaction with mavericks and thought leaders. Turock's most frequent interviewee is his brother, Marty who was a top manager for GE, during the entire 20-year tenure of Jack Welch as CEO.

Since 1986, Art Turock has been a valued resource to over 1,000 businesses, including over 100 Fortune 500 companies, including Merck, IBM, 3M, Motorola, AT&T, and many others.

What Art Turock Talks About:

Sustaining exceptional performance is always difficult – but Art believes that it is more possible in today's competitive climate. His latest work challenges the conventional wisdom ‘ask customers what they want and give it to them.’ Art will demonstrates that industry trendsetters respond to customers’ latent needs – that is, give them products and services they will value but would never think to ask for.

Art Turock’s Popular Topics:

Invent Business Opportunities No One Else Can Imagine
When the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments for Business Success come down from Corporate Mount Sinai, they will include: Ask customers what they want and give it to them. But is it all that simple? Unless you are blessed with Jules Verne-like visionary customers, their answers to surveys and focus groups will be minor tweaks on what the industry is already providing, not exactly the input the fuels bold innovation. Sales goldmines lie in recognizing and offering solutions to latent needs – that is, what customers might value but have never experienced and would never think to ask for. But how do you know your customers' needs before they do? This program covers five integral elements for inventing business opportunities no one – your customers or competition – can imagine.

Change Mastery: Reinventing the Competitive Game
Your best sustainable edge is being better at mastering change than your competition. Change-master companies excel because of two strengths. First, they see the danger of relying on yesterday's winning formula which is really a disguise for resisting change. Second, they know how to minimize resistance and create positive momentum for change. Topics covered include: getting committed buy-in for change; curtailing blaming, instilling ownership; viewing uncertainty as a positive condition; and staying focused on results despite distractions.

The Leadership Dilemma: Making the Transition from Too Much Management to the Right Amount of Leadership
As the pace and complexity of change intensify, every business must examine its balance of management and leadership capabilities. ‘Management’ specifically deals with short time frames, details, eliminating risks, scrupulous rationality, and gaining compliance with existing best practices, toward the goal of producing predictable results. Leadership emphasizes long term viewpoint, calculated risks, inspiring people's values, and reinventing strategies to prepare an organization for the future marketplace. Achieving the right balance leads to the perfect blend of continuous quality improvement and strategic foresight that characterize winners.

What Great Managers do to Retain Top Talent and Motivate Peak Performance
Faced with tight labor markets, unprecedented change to manage, and tough demands for productivity, today's managers are searching for solid answers. This program capitalizes on a 15-year Gallup Organization Study (compromising 1 million talented employees and 10,000 great managers) that examines two pivotal questions:
- What does top talent need from their work environment to produce profound results?
- What are the best practices employed by great managers for retaining and motivating top talent?
The study offers conclusive evidence for the power of managers in influencing employee performance.

Sustaining Exceptional Performance: Honoring Your Company's Best
This program is especially suited for Recognition Events or where a group seeks to preview the qualities of the most valuable performers in the 21st century organization. It is designed for professionals who've developed their skills to a mastery level but now require powerful self-management strategies to eclipse their already extraordinary results. Techniques include: peak performance goal-setting, being value-driven, developing a healthy disregard for the impossible, and becoming a role pioneer. Instead of flashes of brilliance, exceptional performers know how to cause breakthroughs by design, under any and all business circumstances.