Achieve Peak Performance!
Achieve Peak Performance!
How Does Transforming
Differ from Learning?
2Selfs Theory
Our coaching practice is built upon applying root-cause, theory-anchored processes based on a business-friendly theory of the mind, 2Selfs Theory. That theory identifies that we all operate in two distinct modes – a thinking mode and an automatic mode. Hence, we can view us as having two “selfs,” a thinking-self and an auto-self. Because most people do not explicitly recognize the existence of two distinct mental modes, it can help to visualize our dual realities by using icons – a light bulb for our thinking-self and a robot for our auto-self, which operates like a group of “robots within.”
The Thinking-Self
The Auto-Self
2Selfs Theory recognizes four types of auto-self activities.
The two types that concern us here are auto-behaviors and auto-contexts.
The Auto-Self
Auto-behaviors are the often counterproductive behavior habits that business leaders need to transform. Because our auto-self works in so many elusive ways that operate outside of our normal awareness, we will use specific forms of robots to help visualize the different types of auto-self activities and then use situational poses for these robots to indicate the specific nature of activities they produce.
Auto-Contexts
Auto-behaviors are the often counterproductive behavior habits that business leaders need to transform. Because our auto-self works in so many elusive ways that operate outside of our normal awareness, we will use specific forms of robots to help visualize the different types of auto-self activities and then use situational poses for these robots to indicate the specific nature of activities they produce.
Two major characteristics of auto-contexts: they are hard to recognize within us and they are very difficult to reconstruct. Among the ways auto-contexts impact our successes, they control our business cultures, problem-solving worldviews, attitudes, and self-images, which routinely block us from making changes to respond to the growing turbulence in our business environment.
Comfort Imperative
This auto-self property produces enormous control over human activities including automatic behavior habits, blocking transformations of habits and cultures, and causing seduction traps in the form of simplistic solution that are now running rampant. It’s an imperative because it drives us relentlessly in ways we can’t control and normally don’t even notice. It causes us to fail to take needed actions, to take actions that are counterproductive and even dysfunctional, and to fall for simplistic solutions. Pleasure drives us to do things we should not do. However, the greatest barrier to successes is that discomfort relentlessly drives us to avoid taking crucial actions.
Overbearing Behaviors
Chronic Barrier to Action
Procastination/Timidity
Untermines doing of self
Aggression/Micromanagement
Undermines doing of others
Simplistic solutions satisfy the desire for a solution without providing the solution desired. They are seduction traps that we fall into to alleviate our immediate discomfort often at the enormous cost of creating much greater long-term failure pain.
It’s not hard to find examples of simplistic solutions in business. Business people realize, as Max did, that success factors exist that they do not control effectively. The resultant discomfort makes them vulnerable to simplistic solutions that promise future successes without addressing the underlying problems. It may surprise you that a suite of four highly popular and widely read “best practices” business books fall into this category.
-
In Search of Excellence
-
Built to Last
-
What Really Works
-
Good to Great
You likely have read one or more of these “sustainable success” books and might have received some benefits, so perhaps you are wondering why I claim they are simplistic solutions. Phil Rosenzweig exposed their many flaws in his book, The Halo Effect: . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers. While many in the press lavishly praised these books, a few saw through them. George Anders of the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Good to Great offered a picture of the business world somewhere between Norman Rockwell and Mr. Rogers – a simple and reassuring place of homespun values and old-fashioned virtues where everyone feels safe and secure” (p. 129 in Halo). Whenever there is unrelenting discomfort without a viable solution in sight, simplistic solutions run rampant. You can see my 2Selfs Theory analysis of Rosenzweig’s teardown of these “best practices” books here: www.2Selfs.com/halo. The realization that they are not adequately managing many critical (particularly “soft”) success factors has caused discomfort for many business leaders, and the resultant, often unnoticed, need to escape this discomfort has led many to fall for a large number of these simplistic solutions.
In addition to realizing how the “sustainable success” books wildly missed their hyperbolic claims, it now becomes obvious to us why self-help attempts at transforming our auto-behaviors rarely work. Behavior transformations create discomfort, and the Comfort Imperative relentlessly drives us to escape discomfort, so most people quit before they achieve their desired results.
In general terms, the way to transform auto-behaviors is to apply the counteracting principle where we symbolically fight fire with fire by having our thinking-self create feelings to counteract the discomfort of transformational change instead of trying to use intentions and willpower directly.
Learning vs. Transforming
With 2Selfs Theory, the distinction between learning and transforming becomes obvious. Learning is a thinking-self activity and all successful business leaders participate in a continuous learning process that leverages the many mechanisms now available. This is an important incremental knowledge-acquisition activity.
Transforming is a newer, more difficult activity that has now become imperative due to massive, unrelenting changes in the business environment. These business environment changes are systemic because technology and product advances, mostly underpinned by digital technologies, will continue to drive them. Whereas learning is a continuous, incremental thinking-self-based process, transforming is a discrete, periodic auto-self-based process. All successful business people have become accustomed to continuous learning, but most have not yet learned they must also add periodic transforming, which is a much more difficult process often requiring external help. You will now see how this distinction manifests in the types of coaching currently available.
Types of Coaching
As careers derail and companies fail, many business leaders have started to recognize increasingly often that the so-called “soft” success factors are responsible. As a result, various forms of solutions have emerged including a massive industry focused on self-help, the wildly popular set of books focused on “best practices” for “sustainable success” identified above, and a rapidly growing “coaching” industry.
In spite of laudable efforts to create some coaching standards and issue competency certificates, the rate of growth of coaching has outpaced the emergence of effective competencies. Also, some providers are not doing well at advertising the nature of their offerings, and I suspect many of them don’t understand well what they actually provide. To help you understand the types of coaching available, I offer the following list.
Life Coaching
This is a consumer-oriented approach that helps clients through “life” situations including advice on career choices, putting relationships back together, and attaining better motivation. We do not participate in this type of coaching.
Business Advisory Coaching
This is a thinking-self-centric activity that also goes by the name of consulting. Many service providers position themselves as coaches, and they focus mainly on advice. Some of these coaches operate at the same level as life coaches, so they offer little effective help for business leaders. However, at the high-end, experts with deep technical and managerial experience can provide highly valuable advice. This is not the focus of 2Selfs Inc.
Business Behavior-Transformation Coaching
This is a thinking-self-centric activity that also goes by the name of consulting. Many service providers position themselves as coaches, and they focus mainly on advice. Some of these coaches operate at the same level as life coaches, so they offer little effective help for business leaders. However, at the high-end, experts with deep technical and managerial experience can provide highly valuable advice. This is not the focus of 2Selfs Inc.
2Selfs Theory
The Thinking-Self
The Auto-Self
2Selfs Theory recognizes four types of auto-self activities.
The two types that concern us here are auto-behaviors and auto-contexts.
The Auto-Self
Auto-behaviors are the often counterproductive behavior habits that business leaders need to transform. Because our auto-self works in so many elusive ways that operate outside of our normal awareness, we will use specific forms of robots to help visualize the different types of auto-self activities and then use situational poses for these robots to indicate the specific nature of activities they produce.
Auto-Contexts
Auto-behaviors are the often counterproductive behavior habits that business leaders need to transform. Because our auto-self works in so many elusive ways that operate outside of our normal awareness, we will use specific forms of robots to help visualize the different types of auto-self activities and then use situational poses for these robots to indicate the specific nature of activities they produce.
Two major characteristics of auto-contexts: they are hard to recognize within us and they are very difficult to reconstruct. Among the ways auto-contexts impact our successes, they control our business cultures, problem-solving worldviews, attitudes, and self-images, which routinely block us from making changes to respond to the growing turbulence in our business environment.
Comfort Imperative
This auto-self property produces enormous control over human activities including automatic behavior habits, blocking transformations of habits and cultures, and causing seduction traps in the form of simplistic solution that are now running rampant. It’s an imperative because it drives us relentlessly in ways we can’t control and normally don’t even notice. It causes us to fail to take needed actions, to take actions that are counterproductive and even dysfunctional, and to fall for simplistic solutions. Pleasure drives us to do things we should not do. However, the greatest barrier to successes is that discomfort relentlessly drives us to avoid taking crucial actions.
Overbearing Behaviors
Chronic Barrier to Action
Procastination/Timidity
Untermines doing of self
Aggression/Micromanagement
Undermines doing of others
Simplistic solutions satisfy the desire for a solution without providing the solution desired. They are seduction traps that we fall into to alleviate our immediate discomfort often at the enormous cost of creating much greater long-term failure pain.
It’s not hard to find examples of simplistic solutions in business. Business people realize, as Max did, that success factors exist that they do not control effectively. The resultant discomfort makes them vulnerable to simplistic solutions that promise future successes without addressing the underlying problems. It may surprise you that a suite of four highly popular and widely read “best practices” business books fall into this category.
-
In Search of Excellence
-
Built to Last
-
What Really Works
-
Good to Great
You likely have read one or more of these “sustainable success” books and might have received some benefits, so perhaps you are wondering why I claim they are simplistic solutions. Phil Rosenzweig exposed their many flaws in his book, The Halo Effect: . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers. While many in the press lavishly praised these books, a few saw through them. George Anders of the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Good to Great offered a picture of the business world somewhere between Norman Rockwell and Mr. Rogers – a simple and reassuring place of homespun values and old-fashioned virtues where everyone feels safe and secure” (p. 129 in Halo). Whenever there is unrelenting discomfort without a viable solution in sight, simplistic solutions run rampant. You can see my 2Selfs Theory analysis of Rosenzweig’s teardown of these “best practices” books here: www.2Selfs.com/halo. The realization that they are not adequately managing many critical (particularly “soft”) success factors has caused discomfort for many business leaders, and the resultant, often unnoticed, need to escape this discomfort has led many to fall for a large number of these simplistic solutions.
In addition to realizing how the “sustainable success” books wildly missed their hyperbolic claims, it now becomes obvious to us why self-help attempts at transforming our auto-behaviors rarely work. Behavior transformations create discomfort, and the Comfort Imperative relentlessly drives us to escape discomfort, so most people quit before they achieve their desired results.
In general terms, the way to transform auto-behaviors is to apply the counteracting principle where we symbolically fight fire with fire by having our thinking-self create feelings to counteract the discomfort of transformational change instead of trying to use intentions and willpower directly.
Learning vs. Transforming
With 2Selfs Theory, the distinction between learning and transforming becomes obvious. Learning is a thinking-self activity and all successful business leaders participate in a continuous learning process that leverages the many mechanisms now available. This is an important incremental knowledge-acquisition activity.
Transforming is a newer, more difficult activity that has now become imperative due to massive, unrelenting changes in the business environment. These business environment changes are systemic because technology and product advances, mostly underpinned by digital technologies, will continue to drive them. Whereas learning is a continuous, incremental thinking-self-based process, transforming is a discrete, periodic auto-self-based process. All successful business people have become accustomed to continuous learning, but most have not yet learned they must also add periodic transforming, which is a much more difficult process often requiring external help. You will now see how this distinction manifests in the types of coaching currently available.
Types of Coaching
As careers derail and companies fail, many business leaders have started to recognize increasingly often that the so-called “soft” success factors are responsible. As a result, various forms of solutions have emerged including a massive industry focused on self-help, the wildly popular set of books focused on “best practices” for “sustainable success” identified above, and a rapidly growing “coaching” industry.
In spite of laudable efforts to create some coaching standards and issue competency certificates, the rate of growth of coaching has outpaced the emergence of effective competencies. Also, some providers are not doing well at advertising the nature of their offerings, and I suspect many of them don’t understand well what they actually provide. To help you understand the types of coaching available, I offer the following list.
Life Coaching
This is a consumer-oriented approach that helps clients through “life” situations including advice on career choices, putting relationships back together, and attaining better motivation. We do not participate in this type of coaching.
Business Advisory Coaching
This is a thinking-self-centric activity that also goes by the name of consulting. Many service providers position themselves as coaches, and they focus mainly on advice. Some of these coaches operate at the same level as life coaches, so they offer little effective help for business leaders. However, at the high-end, experts with deep technical and managerial experience can provide highly valuable advice. This is not the focus of 2Selfs Inc.
Business Behavior-Transformation Coaching
As with advisory coaching, the level of services provided by coaches who claim to focus on behavior transformations varies widely. Some companies have retained us to pick up the pieces when inexperienced transformation coaches attempted to reconstruct bad habits of their leaders.
I have also attempted to use the service of coaches who have certificates from reputable training organizations, but they lacked sufficient techniques and experience to provide any meaningful habit changes.
Transform the Two Main Forms of Dysfunctional Auto-Behaviors
We focus on overcoming the effects of the Comfort Imperative and applying counteracting techniques to drive transformational changes systematically. You can see an outline of this process here.
Business Culture-Change Coaching
Here is where you will see a dramatic departure in the nature of coaching services. While many business-related coaches offer advice and a huge number claim to provide behavior transformations, very few know how to, or even claim to, provide culture-change coaching.
Reconstruct Obsolete Culture
This is where having a theory of automatic human activities provides great dividends because 2Selfs Theory not only explains how the auto-self operates; it provides systematic techniques to transform auto-behaviors. Going further, 2Selfs Theory also explains how auto-contexts operate and provides methodical processes to reconstruct auto-contexts in their many manifestations including as business cultures. Additionally, 2Selfs Theory reveals the synergy between auto-behaviors and auto-contexts, so it makes coaching both crucial types of business transformations possible.
Transformations to Become Transformable
I once to coached a CEO, Richard, who had similar characteristics to Max, who you met on the Why Coaching webpage. However, this time his HR director, Tim, brought me in early enough so that over a one-year coaching engagement, Richard overcame his overly aggressive behaviors.
Also, the combination of Richard, Tim who I was training to coach, and some additional coaching on my part, we developed the entire executive team to perform at a very high level.
The three of us noticed that the level below the executive staff often did not meet their commitments. Instead of providing one-on-one coaching for this broader group of managers, we decided to run a five-session commitments/accountability workshop. I had Tim co-facilitate that workshop series with me as part of his training. Although most of the participants started out highly skeptical we would make progress, the combination of guided role-playing with feedback from other participants and practice between sessions created the desired results. Even the most cynical of the participants made changes in themselves and admitted that others changed beyond their expectations.
The final piece in making Richard’s company transformable was to conduct a culture-reconstruction retreat. Richard and I worked on open questions to ask the leaders and top individual contributors in preparation for the retreat. Armed with that input on innovative technologies, products, and marketing concepts buried in the company, we were able to prioritize opportunities and work through the culture rigor mortis intrinsic to companies as they cling to their past successes. We came out of that retreat with some positive tangible new directions, which the company implemented.
Even more important than the individual behavior reconstructions, a specific operating process transformation, and some specific culture changes, the leadership of the company became transformable. That empowered the leaders of the company to make a strong culture pivot to survive and begin prospering in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that had a strong negative effect on their mainline business.
Become Transformable!
Future successes for business leaders and the companies they lead now require they add periodic transforming to the process of continuous learning. Symbolically reprogramming internal auto-self robots takes specialized skills, accumulated experience, and great tenacity
You need to focus on auto-context transformations (especially culture changes) in addition to auto-behavior transformations.
Auto-self transformations require specialized capabilities that medium-to-large sized businesses should bring in-house, but they may need expert external resources to bootstrap this process
As business-environment disruptions accelerate and global competition increases, the concept of trying to find a fixed formula for sustainable success has become archaic. The new focus should be on achieving repeated successes that rely on periodic auto-self transformations in addition to continuous learning.
Short-term competitive advantage and long-term viability now require business leaders and businesses to become transformable!
Theory-Based Management of
Automatic Human Activities
Businesses, along with many other types of activities, have now passed the point where they can achieve repeated successes without conquering automatic human activities. The fundamental problem we now face is that our amazing problem-solving capabilities for the physical world in the form of massive technology and product advances have created collateral damage because we cannot currently manage the unintended consequences to many of those activities we perform automatically, independent of our intentions. This abilities mismatch is fundamental and business leaders will not have a successful path forward until they learn to understand and manage automatic activities explicitly.
As with Max on the Why Coaching page, nearly all business leaders have at least some indirect understanding of the amorphous success factors that they realize exist, but they don’t know how to manage them systematically, or they use some form of seat-of-the-pants solutions. As the mismatch between the technology disruptions in the business environment and our abilities to accommodate them systematically escalates, we increasing find careers derailing and companies failing. The cold, hard reality is that indirect ways to manage our automatic activities, while they have provided benefits, are increasingly failing to meet the demands of our times. The only viable path forward for repeated successes in business is to use a comprehensive theory of automatic mental processes so that we can prosper as the technology tsunamis crash over us.
2Selfs Theory
Our coaching practice is built upon applying root-cause, theory-anchored processes based on a business-friendly theory of the mind, 2Selfs Theory. That theory identifies that we all operate in two distinct modes – a thinking mode and an automatic mode. Hence, we can view us as having two “selfs,” a thinking-self and an auto-self. Because most people do not explicitly recognize the existence of two distinct mental modes, it can help to visualize our dual realities by using icons – a light bulb for our thinking-self and a robot for our auto-self, which operates like a group of “robots within.”
The Thinking-Self
The Auto-Self
2Selfs Theory recognizes four types of auto-self activities.
The two types that concern us here are auto-behaviors and auto-contexts.
Auto-Behaviors
Auto-behaviors are the often counterproductive behavior habits that business leaders need to transform. Because our auto-self works in so many elusive ways that operate outside of our normal awareness, we will use specific forms of robots to help visualize the different types of auto-self activities and then use situational poses for these robots to indicate the specific nature of activities they produce.
Auto-Contexts
Auto-contexts contain fundamental assumptions, beliefs, or certainties that may or may not correspond with realities outside of our mind. They create a reality “lens” through which we see and experience the world around us.
Two major characteristics of auto-contexts: they are hard to recognize within us and they are very difficult to reconstruct. Among the ways auto-contexts impact our successes, they control our business cultures, problem-solving worldviews, attitudes, and self-images, which routinely block us from making changes to respond to the growing turbulence in our business environment.
Comfort Imperative
This auto-self property produces enormous control over human activities including automatic behavior habits, blocking transformations of habits and cultures, and causing seduction traps in the form of simplistic solution that are now running rampant. It’s an imperative because it drives us relentlessly in ways we can’t control and normally don’t even notice. It causes us to fail to take needed actions, to take actions that are counterproductive and even dysfunctional, and to fall for simplistic solutions. Pleasure drives us to do things we should not do. However, the greatest barrier to successes is that discomfort relentlessly drives us to avoid taking crucial actions.
Overbearing Behaviors
Chronic Barrier to Action
Procastination/Timidity
Untermines doing of self
Aggression/Micromanagement
Undermines doing of others
Simplistic solutions satisfy the desire for a solution without providing the solution desired. They are seduction traps that we fall into to alleviate our immediate discomfort often at the enormous cost of creating much greater long-term failure pain.
It’s not hard to find examples of simplistic solutions in business. Business people realize, as Max did, that success factors exist that they do not control effectively. The resultant discomfort makes them vulnerable to simplistic solutions that promise future successes without addressing the underlying problems. It may surprise you that a suite of four highly popular and widely read “best practices” business books fall into this category.
-
In Search of Excellence
-
Built to Last
-
What Really Works
-
Good to Great
You likely have read one or more of these “sustainable success” books and might have received some benefits, so perhaps you are wondering why I claim they are simplistic solutions. Phil Rosenzweig exposed their many flaws in his book, The Halo Effect: . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers. While many in the press lavishly praised these books, a few saw through them. George Anders of the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Good to Great offered a picture of the business world somewhere between Norman Rockwell and Mr. Rogers – a simple and reassuring place of homespun values and old-fashioned virtues where everyone feels safe and secure” (p. 129 in Halo). Whenever there is unrelenting discomfort without a viable solution in sight, simplistic solutions run rampant. You can see my 2Selfs Theory analysis of Rosenzweig’s teardown of these “best practices” books here: www.2Selfs.com/halo. The realization that they are not adequately managing many critical (particularly “soft”) success factors has caused discomfort for many business leaders, and the resultant, often unnoticed, need to escape this discomfort has led many to fall for a large number of these simplistic solutions.
In addition to realizing how the “sustainable success” books wildly missed their hyperbolic claims, it now becomes obvious to us why self-help attempts at transforming our auto-behaviors rarely work. Behavior transformations create discomfort, and the Comfort Imperative relentlessly drives us to escape discomfort, so most people quit before they achieve their desired results.
In general terms, the way to transform auto-behaviors is to apply the counteracting principle where we symbolically fight fire with fire by having our thinking-self create feelings to counteract the discomfort of transformational change instead of trying to use intentions and willpower directly.
Learning vs. Transforming
With 2Selfs Theory, the distinction between learning and transforming becomes obvious.
Learning is a thinking-self activity and all successful business leaders participate in a continuous learning process that leverages the many mechanisms now available. This is an important incremental knowledge-acquisition activity.
Transforming is a newer, more difficult activity that has now become imperative due to massive, unrelenting changes in the business environment. These business environment changes are systemic because technology and product advances, mostly underpinned by digital technologies, will continue to drive them. Whereas learning is a continuous, incremental thinking-self-based process, transforming is a discrete, periodic auto-self-based process. All successful business people have become accustomed to continuous learning, but most have not yet learned they must also add periodic transforming, which is a much more difficult process often requiring external help. You will now see how this distinction manifests in the types of coaching currently available.
Types of Coaching
As careers derail and companies fail, many business leaders have started to recognize increasingly often that the so-called “soft” success factors are responsible. As a result, various forms of solutions have emerged including a massive industry focused on self-help, the wildly popular set of books focused on “best practices” for “sustainable success” identified above, and a rapidly growing “coaching” industry.
In spite of laudable efforts to create some coaching standards and issue competency certificates, the rate of growth of coaching has outpaced the emergence of effective competencies. Also, some providers are not doing well at advertising the nature of their offerings, and I suspect many of them don’t understand well what they actually provide. To help you understand the types of coaching available, I offer the following list.
Life Coaching
This is a consumer-oriented approach that helps clients through “life” situations including advice on career choices, putting relationships back together, and attaining better health. We do not participate in this type of coaching.
Business Advisory Coaching
This is a thinking-self-centric activity that also goes by the name of consulting. Many service providers position themselves as coaches, and they focus mainly on advice. Some of these coaches operate at the same level as life coaches, so they offer little effective help for business leaders. However, at the high-end, experts with deep technical and managerial experience can provide highly valuable advice. This is not the focus of 2Selfs Inc.
Business Behavior-Transformation Coaching
As with advisory coaching, the level of services provided by coaches who claim to focus on behavior transformations varies widely. Some companies have retained us to pick up the pieces when inexperienced transformation coaches attempted to reconstruct bad habits of their leaders.
I have also attempted to use the service of coaches who have certificates from reputable training organizations, but they lacked sufficient techniques and experience to provide any meaningful habit changes.
Transform the Two Main Forms of Dysfunctional Auto-Behaviors
We focus on overcoming the effects of the Comfort Imperative and applying counteracting techniques to drive transformational changes systematically. You can see an outline of this process here.
Reconstruct Obsolete Culture
Business Culture-Change Coaching
Here is where you will see a dramatic departure in the nature of coaching services. While many business-related coaches offer advice and a huge number claim to provide behavior transformations, very few know how to, or even claim to, provide culture-change coaching.
This is where having a theory of automatic human activities provides great dividends because 2Selfs Theory not only explains how the auto-self operates; it provides systematic techniques to transform auto-behaviors. Going further, 2Selfs Theory also explains how auto-contexts operate and provides methodical processes to reconstruct auto-contexts in their many manifestations including as business cultures. Additionally, 2Selfs Theory reveals the synergy between auto-behaviors and auto-contexts, so it makes coaching both crucial types of business transformations possible.
Transformations to Become Transformable
I once to coached a CEO, Richard, who had similar characteristics to Max, who you met on the Why Coaching webpage. However, this time his HR director, Tim, brought me in early enough so that over a one-year coaching engagement, Richard overcame his overly aggressive behaviors.
Also, the combination of Richard, Tim who I was training to coach, and some additional coaching on my part, developed the entire executive team to perform at a very high level.
The three of us noticed that the level below the executive staff often did not meet their commitments. Instead of providing one-on-one coaching for this broader group of managers, we decided to run a five-session commitments/accountability workshop. I had Tim co-facilitate that workshop series with me as part of his training. Although most of the participants started out highly skeptical we would make progress, the combination of guided role-playing with feedback from other participants and practice between sessions created the desired results. Even the most cynical of the participants made changes in themselves and admitted that others changed beyond their expectations.
The final piece in making Richard’s company transformable was to conduct a culture-reconstruction retreat. Richard and I worked on open questions to ask the leaders and top individual contributors in preparation for the retreat. Armed with that input on innovative technologies, products, and marketing concepts buried in the company, we were able to prioritize opportunities and work through the culture rigor mortis intrinsic to companies as they cling to their past successes. We came out of that retreat with some positive tangible new directions, which the company implemented.
Even more important than the individual behavior reconstructions, a specific operating process transformation, and some specific culture changes, the leadership of the company became transformable. That empowered the leaders of the company to make a strong culture pivot to survive and begin prospering in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that had a strong negative effect on their mainline business.