Silver Streak Partners LLC

EXECUTIVE WORKSHOPS

When problems seem intractable and solutions seem elusive, it may be time to step back and reframe the issue. Our executive workshops provide a fresh perspective and facilitated dialog to help your team create new systemic solutions and get behind a shared vision for lasting improvement.

We offer both half- and full-day workshops. Short discussions with new product stake holders before the day of the workshop help us focus the event specifically on your company and your situation.

Half-day workshops involve four steps to clarify root causes of problems and requirements for implementing lasting improvements. The first step is a presentation to frame underlying issues, which is followed by interactive discussion of symptoms and causes as your people see them. Then the focus moves to the issues involved in implementing improvements, and finally attendees discuss these issues in your company’s context.

Full-day workshops continue the process to examine alternative improvements and outline an action plan. Through guided and facilitated dialog, your team will identify and prioritize the solutions that provide the greatest returns for your company. Finally, workshop participants collaborate to outline an action plan for implementing the selected operational and organizational changes.

To ensure that the ideas you develop are sound, broadly understood and widely supported, our workshops are designed for attendance by the entire executive team as well as key players in the new product operation.

Workshops cover the critical issues that impact growing companies:

Dependable Schedules: Unreliable new product schedules lead to fighting fires and juggling resources … and chronic headaches. Even worse, they disappoint customers and undermine confidence in your new products. You can try attacking the problem symptomatically by simply demanding on time releases, but that just makes problems show up somewhere else. This workshop explores systemic approaches to making product schedules dependable.

Bringing Product Innovation up to Speed: Faster response to market opportunities would improve business results for most enterprises. Just exhorting R&D teams to work faster has limited effect, and cutting corners to meet schedules can lead to disaster. This workshop develops ideas about how you can improve your new product responsiveness by addressing a set of fundamental issues.

Innovators and Managers: Effective collaboration between managers and innovators is crucial to competitive product innovation in growing companies, but differences in perspective and poor communications often separate them. This workshop delves into the underlying causes of the innovator-manager schism and explores ways to bridge the gap.

Effective Communication for Effective Innovation: As your company grows in size and complexity, effective communication can increase your return on innovation in several important ways. The most immediate payback will come from improving the clarity and shared meaning of the technical and business information that supports new product development. This workshop also addresses larger issues, such as the power of effective communication to improve cross-functional collaboration, project teamwork, individual performance, and organizational capacity to respond to future opportunities.

Building a Culture of Innovation: As a company grows, the leadership challenge is to preserve the competitive, innovative spirit that fueled its start-up success. This workshop examines the elements of corporate culture and how you can build a sustainable innovation engine by attending to underlying values, hiring practices, reward systems, and other expressions of your organization’s vision.

We are developing new workshops in addition to those listed here. Contact us to explore how an Executive Workshop would help your team.