Beautiful Name; Costco’s Resilience; Belgium Gazelles; Services Replace Products
February 8, 2019
Australian Billionaires; Maddock’s Plan D; Oscar Winner?; Congrats Gunjan; Vegas April 9 – 11
February 22, 2019

HGTV Co-Founder; Best Place to Work; 8 Self-Leadership Traits; Bloomberg CEO Summit

Hello ScaleUps, 

Hope it’s been a productive and purposeful week. Here are some insights to help you outlearn/outthink the competition.

But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.
  Carl Jung as quoted in Fully Human

Bloomberg’s CEO Summit June 17 – 18 NYC –
Join me and a star-studded A-list of speakers and 200+ mid-market CEOs at Bloomberg’s beautiful HQ in NYC for their June 17 – 18 CEO Summit. More info below, but first…

HGTV Co-Founder Susan Packard –
Under Susan Packard’s leadership, HGTV became one of the fastest-growing cable networks in television history. In her new book released this week, Fully Human: 3 Steps to Grow Your Emotional Fitness in Work, Leadership, and Life, Packard shares how to improve what she calls your EQ Fitness and apply it to real world business situations. Jump to chapter 4 for a great reminder of what it means to be a leader that smiles (what it takes to experience joy as the leader of a growing business) – then read the rest of the book. Susan is keynoting our ScaleUp Summit May 21 – 22, Atlanta. SPro and book club members will receive a copy of her book next week for their libraries. 

10 Strategies for Women in the Workplace –
Susan Packard is also the author of New Rules of the Game, written for women leaders. She’ll share many of the lessons from this book, as well, during her interactive keynote in Atlanta. With over 30 years in the cable TV world, Susan has been touted as a pioneer, an innovator and a role model. She's been on the ground floor in the creation of some of the biggest brands in the industry, from HBO to CNBC and, most notably HGTV, as mentioned above. It’s an opportunity for your team to receive some outstanding executive education (which you can also stream back to your company) along with a thousand leaders of other scaleups in attendance – not to be missed.

The 8 C’s of Self-Leadership –
Yesterday I was on the phone with my dear friend Dr. Bill Isaacs, the famous dialogue guru at MIT. He pointed me to Dr. Richard Schwartz’s “Internal Family Systems” framework of self-leadership. Towards the end of his online one-pager, he concludes that:

After twenty years of helping people…The eight Cs of self-leadership include: calmness, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, creativity, courage, and connectedness (emphasis mine).

I can’t think of a better list to live by – personally and professionally. Print, post, live!

And the Best Place to Work is? –
Fortune magazine released their annual list this morning and the winner is not the typical hi-tech firm with table tennis facilities! Instead, it’s Hilton Hotels. Seems happy employees lead to happy customers which leads to happy shareholders – the stock is up 274% since IPO. The key is CEO Chris Nassetta. Notes Fortune: “Nassetta has worked to upgrade the staff experience and placed a special emphasis on education and training (my emphasis!).” Rounding out the top 10: Salesforce, Wegmans, Workday, and Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants. This just underpins McKinsey’s research I shared last week – it’s brains, not brawn, that wins in the marketplace.

Bloomberg’s CEO Summit June 17 – 18, NYC –
Bloomberg, our partner for the ScaleUp Summits, hosts 18 events throughout the year (and around the globe) for an elite group of mid-market CEOs (above $30 million in revenue). They’ve extended to “my world” an opportunity to invite 35 members. It’s a chance to network with the leadership of both Bloomberg and the other CEO members – a very high quality and global group of roughly 200 CEOs. 

Global membership is just $5k for all 18 events including their “The High Road Driving Experience” where you get to test drive all the brand-new luxury cars before they are available to the public – and the Bloomberg Gala 50 event Dec 9 in NYC. We’ve also included one seat to our Summit ($2k value), so it makes this membership the best if you plan to attend just one Summit in 2019. 

Regional membership is $2500 and includes 14 of the 18 events, the most important being their CEO Summit in NYC June 17 – 18 (Global invited as well). Here’s a link to a list of all 18 events and locations. Attending just one or two is worth the price of membership for Global or Regional. 

Please email me [email protected] if you’re over $30 million in revenue and interested.

Create Yourself!

CEO-BOOTCAMP: spend 3.5 days with Verne, serial entrepreneur John Ratliff, and 6 other CEOs in a beautiful retreat setting, addressing the constraints holding back you, your business, and your industry. March 12 – 15; Jun 4 – 7, 2019.

EXITING: Thinking about selling the business for $40 million or more? Want to get 25% to 200% more than you thought? Request the whitepaper from the Exit Strategies Summit at Harvard from Denise Richmond at (610) 299-6466 or email at [email protected]

COACHING:

Have you ever wondered if working with a coach might accelerate your company's growth, exponentially? Do you have what it takes to move the dial from good to great? Contact us at [email protected] for more information or visit https://coaches.scalingup.com/.

TECHNOLOGY:

Create Accountability – Drive Execution with Align, cloud-based software designed to scale up your Rockefeller Habits implementation. www.aligntoday.com – on your computer, tablet or phone. Click here to watch an introductory video.

Better Book Club — What's your team reading? Increase your books read per team member. Easy, Proven, and in the Cloud at http://www.BetterBookClub.com.

Verne Harnish
Verne Harnish
Verne Harnish is founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and chaired for fifteen years EO’s premiere CEO program, the “Birthing of Giants” and WEO’s “Advanced Business” executive program both held at MIT. Founder and CEO of Gazelles, a global executive education and coaching company with over 150 coaching partners on six continents, Verne has spent the past three decades helping companies scale-up. The “Growth Guy” syndicated columnist, he’s also the Venture columnist for FORTUNE magazine. He’s the author of Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0); Mastering the Rockefeller Habits; and along with the editors of Fortune, authored The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times," for which Jim Collins wrote the foreword. Verne also chairs FORTUNE Magazine’s annual Leadership and Growth Summits and serves on several boards including chairman of The Riordan Clinic and the newly launched Geoversity. He is an investor in many scale-ups. A father of four, he enjoys piano, tennis, and magic as a card-carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.