The Sweeney Agency

About Franck Schuurmans - Expert on Innovation and Decision-making:

Franck Schuurmans is a Senior Consultant and a Director of Decision Strategies International. He is a highly acclaimed, dynamic speaker and author of numerous influential industry reports. Dr. Schuurmans works both with corporate clients as well as with leading non- profit organizations. His areas of expertise are retail finance, governance and the non-profit sector, with a special interest in executive training workshops, board governance and strategy development. Franck is a frequent speaker at conferences and meetings throughout North America and Europe. He is a periodic guest lecturer at the Aresty Institute of Executive Education at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and at The European Centre for Executive Development (CEDEP) at INSEAD in Paris, one of Europe’s leading business schools. Dr. Schuurmans interests are in strategic planning, decision-making, innovation, business management and corporate governance.

Franck Schuurmans received his MA from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. As a Fulbright Fellowship recipient, he was awarded a Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1995. He taught there for several years as a full-time faculty member, and conducted research.

Until 2002 he was the senior vice president of Business and Professional Development for the Credit Union Executives Society (CUES) in Madison, Wisconsin. At CUES he was in charge of all research and professional development, playing a critical role in transforming CUES into the industry’s thought leader. Specifically, he helped expand the CUES-CEO Institute by working closely with several leading academic institutions, such as Berkeley, Cornell and Wharton. This Institute has become the industry gold standard in executive education, with over 500 alumni in senior positions. Franck is a Certified Association Executive (CAE).

With Prof. Paul Schoemaker and others he most recently co-wrote 2010 Scenarios for Credit Unions. He is also the co-author of various Industry Scenario reports including: Scenarios for the Future of Human Resources Management, commissioned by the Society of Human Resource Management; 2020: The Future of the Legal Industry; The Long and Winding Road, Histories of Aging and Aging Services in America, 2006-2016 and Memories of the Future, Scenarios for the Life Insurance Industry. Schoemaker and Schuurmans jointly wrote, Opportunity in Uncertainty: Techniques for turning an Unpredictable Future to your Advantage published in Association Management.

What Franck Schuurmans Talks About:

Planning to Win- An Action Learning Project
The Planning to Win action learning project is a combination of executive education and customized action learning that aims to provide the organization with practical and implementable action plans to improve its performance and/or its point of differentiation.
Deliverables:

• Executive education in specific topics identified by the Senior Leadership Team as critical to the future of the organization
• Identification of implementable action plans relevant to the organization
• Detailed development of business plans to support the action plans including a pro forma. (We will provide participants with hands on training and a business plan template, vision, product description, market opportunity, budget, etc.)
• Optional evaluations of leadership potential of participants based on 360-degree instruments.

Blue Ocean Strategy
Blue Ocean Strategy offers a disciplined approach to the creative process necessary in defining new market opportunities. Developed by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne at INSEAD, the BOS methodology and proven tool set is a critical best practice for companies across numerous industry sectors. Blue Ocean Strategy offers clients a methodology to map a creative, visual exploration of new market territories against current industry realities.

DSI has Blue Ocean Network certified service providers that deliver programs and consulting services to organizations seeking to find innovation opportunities for their business and to enhance the strategic aptitude of their leaders. Interactive workshops and innovation engagements follow a framework and methodology used to instil novel strategic thinking to highly competitive industry spaces.

Improving Your Decision Making Capability
Making decisions in an atmosphere of increasing time pressure, uncertainty, and conflicting advice creates challenges for any manager. Making sound leadership decisions in crisis situations is even more demanding. DSI’s approach to Critical Thinking focuses on how to frame complex issues appropriately the first time. The program presents a roadmap for making winning decisions every time, by alerting managers to common thinking traps and by offering practical remedies.
Deliverables:

• Getting the appropriate frame—knowing what is the problem you are trying to solve
• Identifying creative and actionable alternatives
• Bringing in meaningful, reliable information and a sense of the uncertainty/risks inherent in that information
• Being clear about the values and tradeoffs in choosing among the alternatives
• Using logically correct reasoning when assessing alternatives, the information and the values
• Gaining commitment to action by appropriate stakeholders

Adaptive Strategic Planning
DSI offers a proven strategic planning process to help clients evaluate strategy and where needed, create a set of strategic options to achieve a defined vision and long-term success. The process, led by a team of seasoned professionals, emerges from a series of collaborative sessions. Off-line analytical tasks are conducted between planning meetings to inform and support strategy development and conclusions. DSI can work over flexible time horizons to accommodate the pace and time commitments available from the strategy team. The key objectives in executing this adaptive planning model include:

• Defining future value-maximizing strategies
• Determining the organization’s strategic priorities
• Identifying required core capabilities for achieving the organization’s vision
• Developing strategic initiatives and options
• Developing a strategy implementation roadmap
• Developing a plan to manage execution which addresses barriers to implementation

DSI can also provide more detailed work in options valuation, decision analysis, strategy monitoring and on-going implementation support.

Managing Change
Critical to the success of the approaches listed above is implementation. DSI has in recent years developed unique tools for achieving this at the level of the individual and the organization. Participants will learn to:

• Reduce coordination costs and time to make high-quality team decisions
• Effectively utilize team knowledge for new tasks
• Recognize and overcome common group decision-making biases
• Align team efforts with client and organization demands

Dynamic Governance
DSI provides:

• Self assessment surveys for boards
• Facilitated meetings to develop best practices
• A learning agenda for boards that wish to transform from compliance focus to Peripheral vision and future thinking
• Board strategic planning facilitation