The Sweeney Agency

About Fred Harburg - Leadership Speaker and Performance Coach:

Fred Harburg is an Advisory Board member and keynote speaker for Human Performance Institute. He is a respected consultant, writer, and speaker in the disciplines of leadership, strategy, and performance coaching.

Fred graduated from the US Air Force Academy and served as an Air Force officer and pilot. He flew a variety of jet aircraft in both domestic and international missions some of which were in direct support of the White House. He has a compelling personal history in highly demanding athletic, military, and corporate settings. His wealth of successful experience enables him to credibly declare, Organizations that intelligently equip their leaders to fully engage themselves and their people consistently outperform those that do not!

Fred has lived in the US and abroad and has served in several significant international business leadership roles. He has been both an internal and external organizational architect for Fortune 100 companies including IBM, General Motors, Disney, AT&T, and Fidelity Investments. He served as the Chief Learning Officer and President of Motorola University which at its peak had over 1,000 faculty and staff and operated from more than 20 campuses around the world. His achievements at Motorola University were profiled in the November 2002 issue of Chief Learning Officer Magazine.

Fred holds an MBA from UCLA. He served as a member of the Center for Effective Organizations Advisory Board at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. He is a member of the Chief Learning Officer Magazine Editorial Advisory Board, for which he writes a bimonthly column on strategy. He is also a member of the external board of advisors for the Tufts University Institute for Global Leadership.

What Fred Harburg Talks About:

Energy, not Time, is the Fundamental Currency of High Performance in Business
Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of performance and the most precious gift we have to give. Productivity, as well as health and happiness, are grounded in the skillful management of energy. To be fully engaged means to be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and fully aligned with the company's mission. Each individual represents a cell of potential energy in the larger corporate body. Great leaders begin by effectively managing their own energy. Great leadership is marked by the capacity to mobilize, focus, invest, channel and renew organizational energy in the service of the corporate mission. Just as individuals have a pulse, so too does the corporate body. The skilled management of energy fuels a strong and vibrant pulse and a fully engaged workforce.

The Pulse of High Performance: Life is a Series of Sprints, not a Marathon
The conventional wisdom is that the best way to manage the endless demands of our work lives is to assume the mentality of a marathoner, conserving energy in order to stay the course over many years without burning out. In fact, sustained high performance requires the mentality of a sprinter - fully engaging for clearly defined periods of time and then strategically recovering. To live like a sprinter is to break work down into a series of manageable intervals - fully engaging and then fully recovering. This principle is called oscillation and it creates a powerful pulse that drives greater efficiency, improved health and happiness, and sustained high performance.

The Power of Full Engagement
Nearly 75 percent of American workers are disengaged, according to data collected by the Gallup Organization. To be fully engaged, one must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with the mission of the organization. Drawing on 25 years of experience working with world-class athletes and other elite performers, this presentation describes a unique science-based system for driving full engagement, grounded in the management of personal energy, and the development of highly precise performance rituals.

The Making of a Corporate Athlete
As demand accelerates, many executives lack the capacity to sustain high performance - especially under pressure. The creators of the Corporate Athlete performance model, described in a January 2001 Harvard Business Review article The Making of a Corporate Athlete, argue that in order for executives to achieve sustained high performance, they must learn to train in the same systematic ways that elite athletes do. This requires drawing on four separate but interconnected sources of energy to achieve sustained high performance. This presentation outlines the multidimensional training strategies adopted by executives and managers at more than two dozen Fortune 100 companies.