maximize your impact

Coaching

Coaching helps unlock your leadership potential. It is a partnership between you and your coach. This dynamic process inspires you to unlock your personal and professional potential through a thought-provoking and creative process in which goals are identified, plans developed, and milestones achieved.

Educating

In each class, workshop or presentation, I fuse my knowledge with personal experiences working in a variety of industries and humor to create an engaging experience that provides valuable knowledge you can put into action right away. You’ll come away with deep business insights, knowledge and skills you can apply, strategies you can implement, and tips to overcome challenges.

Speaking

Using humor, storytelling, and energy, I engage the audience and makes complex topics feel relatable and digestible. You can be confident knowing that I will be 100 percent present and ready to liven even the toughest of crowds with applicable wisdom, tools, and knowledge that they can begin using the second they leave the room.

Are you looking for marketing strategies to help your company grow?

It’s irrefutable that our world has been forever changed due to the Covid-19 Pandemic as well as technological advancements. So, how does a business create a marketing strategy to scale their business in 2022; and beyond? Our skilled, knowledgeable, and insightful authors will provide marketing strategies for the future of small to midsize businesses who wish to scale and grow their business.

Sludge: Is Your Product Making Your Customer’s Lives Harder not Easier?

Reading Time: 5 minutes I recently received a letter from a well-known subscription radio service for my car. The letter offers me a seriously discounted rate to renew my lapsed subscription. I won’t be renewing. Why not? The product performs exceptionally well, and the discount is significant. It’s not about the product itself. It’s about the sludge.

The Day I (Almost) Invented the Underwater Calculator and What it Taught Me About Innovation

Reading Time: 3 minutes A few months ago, I found myself in an odd situation. I was about 45 feet below the surface in the waters off Montego Bay, Jamaica. And I needed a calculator. That sent me done a rabbit hole where I didn’t invent the underwater calculator, but learned a key lesson about innovation.

Book Review: Read to Lead by Jeff Brown and Jesse Wisnewski.

Reading Time: 4 minutes I just finished reading a book about reading. It made me think. It made me change some of my own behaviors. It made me want

From Goal to Strategy to Results with GOSPA

Reading Time: 7 minutes I’ve always felt the biggest challenge in strategic planning isn’t coming up with an excellent strategy. The real challenge is bridging the gap between strategy and execution. The GOSPA planning framework solves that problem.

Get On (a) Board

Reading Time: 2 minutes It’s that time of year again. Time for the Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville Board Matching program. This program combines training with a

Interviewing 5: Making the Decision

Reading Time: 7 minutes The interviews are over. Now you have to decide. Who do you hire? Do you hire anyone? How do you combine the feedback of the many people who took part in the process? How do you compare the performance of the candidates across all the dimensions you are considering and identify the best hire? Over the years, I’ve developed a simple and flexible framework that lets me identify the distinctions between the candidates that make a difference and focuses discussion where it needs to be to build consensus.

Interviewing 4: Can You Juggle? — Why Auditions are Better than Questions

Reading Time: 9 minutes “Tell me about a time….” You know those questions. They are the signature of the behavioral interview, which is a key component of most job interviews. But is the behavioral interview the best approach? Many years ago, I read a passage in a book that changed the way I hired developers and has profoundly influenced how I interview today. In this article, part of a series on interviewing knowledge workers, I share that insight and give some guidance on how to apply the technique in the 21st century.

Interviewing 3: Asking The Right Questions

Reading Time: 9 minutes You have a great job description that articulates both the functional and non-functional requirements for the job you are filling. You’ve narrowed down the 250 resumes to the half-dozen you want to interview. Now you have a candidate in front of you and you get to ask questions to determine if this is the one person you want to hire. What questions should you ask? A Google search will give you many “good” questions to ask in any interview. And yes, those are good questions. But are they the right questions for your job? No. Unfortunately, getting to those questions takes some work. Fortunately, you have that amazing job description to work from. In this article, I give you some tools to make it easier

Interviewing 2: On the Problem of Resumes

Reading Time: 11 minutes Resumes. You’ll see a lot of them when hiring. You’ll see good ones. You’ll see bad ones. I can’t tell you how many resumes I’ve looked at over the years. In this article, the second in a series, I tell you how I approach resumes and what I look for to separate the wheat from the chaff.

James Szuch