The Sweeney Agency

About Peter Bregman - Speaker on Leadership & Personal Growth:

Peter Bregman, CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., has used his approach to improve leadership & performance at some of the world’s premier organizations, including Morgan Stanley, NASDAQ, JP Morgan Chase, Victoria’s Secret, Converse, Katz Media Group, Passlogix, and FEI, among others. He has worked with companies throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia and has served as adjunct faculty with Columbia University Business School and the National Outdoor Leadership School.

Author of 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done and Point B: A Short Guide to Leading a Big Change, Peter also writes a weekly column, How We Work, for HarvardBusiness.org and is a regular contributor to Fast Company, Forbes, National Public Radio (NPR), Psychology Today and CNN.

Bregman has based his work on the notion that an organization, at its core, is a platform for talent. By unleashing that talent, focusing it on business results, and aligning it with a compelling vision, both the individual and the organization thrive. Since 1989, he has trained and coached all levels of management and individuals to recognize their leadership, exhibit leadership behaviors, model and stimulate change, and foster their own development and growth as well as that of their teams and colleagues. He earned his B.A. from Princeton University and his M.B.A. from Columbia University.

What Peter BregmanTalks About:

18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done
We squander a tremendous amount of our potential - and organizations waste a tremendous amount of their people’s potential – by focusing on the wrong things or not following through on real priorities. It’s not that people don’t try hard enough, it’s that their efforts don’t reap the benefits they could.

Drawing from his book, 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, Peter sets out the new, simple rules for leading in a way that brings focus to an organization and makes the best use of everyone’s talents. Organizations succeed when people use every part of who they are to take care of their top priorities in the most efficient way possible. In this counter-intuitive speech, Peter shows us how getting people to fit in or fix their weaknesses works against us. Instead, he tells leaders to help people embrace their weaknesses, assert their differences, leverage their strengths, and pursue their passions. And then focus those talents - hour by hour - on the right things, avoiding the inevitable distractions that otherwise subvert our efforts. Because how people spend their time is the key strategic decision they make. Follow-through always appears easy but it never is. When people call, emails arrive, and meetings get scheduled - sometimes without us even knowing - we get distracted.

In this engaging, story-based, and very practical talk, Peter offers ideas, practices, tips, mind hacks, and gentle nudges to help leaders bring focus to their people and their organization. Peter will show audiences:
- How to build a plan that places people at the intersection of their strengths, weaknesses, difference, and passions, maximizing their success and impact on the organization
- An 18-minute plan for managing their day and how it will enable them to get all the right things done.
- How to get traction, stick to their focus, ignore non-priorities, avoid the allure of unproductive busyness and master their boundaries so they can resist distractions.

Leading and Building Effective Teams: Why Communication, Collaboration and Culture Matter
Good relationships are the key to happiness, success, and productivity at the office. But it’s hard to develop and maintain strong ties with people - friends and colleagues alike. Little things get in the way. Someone acts politically. Or says something that offends us. Or we, unwittingly, say something that offends someone else.

These days, more than ever, a unified organization that transcends silos is a distinct competitive advantage. People who think beyond their own team or department or individual set of goals are positioned to become the most valued leaders. Reaching out and working well with others is perhaps the most important skill in today’s complex work environments.

The key to collaboration doesn’t require a complicated restructuring or company-wide transformation. All it requires is that each person makes conscious, strategic choices about how to engage with others. Peter demonstrates how the right set up, the right reminders, and the right debriefs - taking just a few minutes a day - can transform conflict into collaboration and animosity into admiration.

Point B: Change Without Resistance
Seventy percent of all major change efforts fail, mostly because of rampant fear, anxiety and resistance. Do you think of resistance as an inevitable byproduct of change? Peter Bregman, author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading A Big Change, argues that resistance is optional, an unintended consequence of the way most leaders try to execute change.

Peter’s key insight: 'People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.' Peter shows us how and why most change is executed poorly and most change management is counter-productive – creating stress in the leaders and resistance in everyone else. Done well, change isn’t something to suffer through on the way to something better (or maybe just different). Change is really an opportunity to deepen engagement and ownership. To create a workplace where everyone feels responsible for the success of the entire organization.