Institute Workshops Listed By Category

Management Science – Interactive Workshop series
Best Practices Sharing: Mining The Enterprise Gold;
Cultural Awareness In The Workplace: Successful Workforce Teambuilding;
Diversity In The Workplace: A Positive Workforce Protocol;
Ethics, Integrity, And Honesty Best Practices: True Foundation For Business Building;
Strategy And Strategic Planning: The Smart Track To The Future;
Strategic Partnering: Implementation And Conflict Resolution;
Team Builders: Building An Organization, Not Simply “Doing Business”;
The Total Quality Management Series: Outperforming Competition;
Training For TrainersÓ: Your Strategic Link To An Achievement Driven Workforce;

Leadership - Interactive Workshop Series
Communications And Leadership: Inseparable Issues;
Emotional Intelligence: Requisite For True Leadership Performance;
Leadership Development: Growing Leaders And Senior Executives;
Presentation Skills Building: Successful Communications For Leadership;
Women Of Color: Accomplishment-Based Executive Training.

Thinking Development - Interactive Workshop Series
Analytical Thinking: Developing And Harnessing The Workforce Brainpower;
Innovation: Preparing For Tomorrow’s challenges;
Learning Organizations: Magnets For The Best And Brightest Achievers;
Mentoring And Coaching: Creating A True Learning Organization;
Soft Skills That Matter: Using Emotional Intelligence To Grow a Business;
The Six Thinking HatsÔ: The New Idea, Thinking, And Communications Discovery.

The Fast Track - Interactive Workshop Series
Adult Employability Skills Workshop: For the Disadvantaged and Unemployed
Adult Entrepreneurship/New Business Expansion: Local Economic Development
Do It Now: Procrastination Is A Corporate Liability;
Entrepreneurship: Creating An Enterprise Vision, And Delivering On Its Premise;
Foreign Trade: Introduction And Primer To Overseas Markets;
The MATF ProgramÓ: Internal Fast Track Communications Format;
The Trade Show Mentality: Projects Delivered On Time, Every Time;
Win-Win Career StartÓ: Teen Employability Skills Development And Job Fair Preparation.

Your workforce must learn what they don’t know . . . and skillfully use what they learn. They cannot make expert use of valuable traits they do not possess. We refer to a new self-awareness, new skills development . . . new levels of wisdom and knowledge . . . strategies for planning and implementing action . . . successful execution of Strategic Objectives . . . and measuring accomplishments.

(Ô Dr. Edward DeBono /The Six Thinking Hats. All Rights Reserved.)


Management Science - Interactive Workshop Series


• Best Practices Sharing: Mining The Enterprise Gold
This Workshop focuses on determining what constitutes “Best Practices,” how the protocols can be measured at several levels, and how Best Practices Sharing is introduced into operating methodology. This intensely fundamental process is seamlessly woven into the enterprise fabric to derive the greatest value and benefits from the acquisition, and making prudent use of the accumulation of “operational smarts.”

• Cultural Awareness In The Workplace: Successful WorkForce Teambuilding
This Workshop examines the broad issues and idiosyncrasies that encompass the subject matter. Personal habits of hygiene, dress, hand and body gestures, speech, holidays, belief systems and perceptions, religious, racial and gender issues, food and dining habits and table manners, and a myriad of what-to-do, what not-to-do, relative to a great many cultures are examined and practiced as a function of this Workshop.

• Diversity In The Workplace: A Positive Workforce Performance Protocol
The full range of issues of gender, racial and religious bias and cultural misconceptions are explored. Legal Information pertinent to the Workshop issues is explored. Attendees become involved in a series of “mock” situations, and practice making judgments, initiate actions, create an overall strategy to satisfy the requisite issues, and seek to avoid litigation resulting in negative and disastrous Public Relations notoriety.

• Ethics, Integrity And Honesty Best Practices: Principles For Tomorrows Enterprise
Curative activity only works successfully through systemic applications. The activity steps also include the use of Company Manuals, presentations to new-hires, and a host of other Workshop based protocols that drive this issue home.

Understanding what constitutes adverse behavior in this program is coupled with the actions to be taken to prevent negative behavior through a series of strategies and implementation activity.

• Strategy And Strategic Planning: Window To Your Future
Strategy is explored in a simple format so that a consummate understanding of the process is effectively absorbed. We continue the Strategy learning process in its many forms and nuances that can be understood and utilized effectively by introducing “training units.” We “attach” a series of Strategic tools and protocols in a building block process that allows for quick understanding and multiplicity of use.

• Strategic Partnering: Implementation and Conflict Resolution
The Strategic Objective of having clear, definitive, understanding between interactive groups regardless of their precise relationships is foundational for cooperative activity. When those understandings are violated, conflicts arise and costly steps are required for resolution.

Partnering Protocols serve to eliminate or reduce conflicts in the target enterprise environment. Our Partnering Implementation Workshop Program is based upon successful, demonstrated experiences in the US and overseas markets. The forum is purposely Interactive since the most effective learning takes place in this focused, deliberate, environment.

• Team Builders: Building A Business, Not Simply Doing Business
Team Builders explore the intricate mechanisms of every individual’s activity in a combined effort to achieve the pre-ordained goals and accomplishments that Teams have skillfully planned. Sounds like a mouthful to chew on, but it spells coordinated and practiced activity that successfully harnesses the brainpower and energy of your entire workforce.

• Total Quality Management Series: Outperforming Competition
True productivity is a result of wise decisions, education, skills, commitment, and attitude! This Workshop addresses the primary differences between activity and productivity and benchmarks the process for clarification and utilization in the enterprise or “public” environment. TQM is one of the most lethal forms of competition reduction and strategic advantage.

This Workshop explores the individual segments that comprise the Total Quality Management subjects into their individual areas of operational characteristics. We begin with the early protocols to the later more mature agendas. They are addressed in that order.

• Experiential Training For TrainersÓ: Your Strategic Link To The Most Productive Workforce
This workshop is devoted to the training of Trainers who will be conducting Experiential Workshops. However, the training format will dramatically improve and upgrade the skills of any mentor, trainer, teacher, coach, or any one who is charged with the responsibility of engaging in a Learning or skill-based curriculum effort.

This Workshop makes a valuable distinction between “telling and talking,” a primary aspect of conveying information that does not imbue skill development, from Experiential Learning, which encompasses knowledge management, skill-building, practice under supervision, leadership and communication drills, Teammanship, and innovative thinking.

In seminar activity, the thinking-skills issues that imbeds the knowledge and/or skill building that was expected of the training activity is not accounted for, nor fulfills the promises inherent in what the training should have accomplished. All of the above is fulfilled in Experiential Workshop venues. This has been delivered as a University Level, Accredited Certification Program.


Leadership Interactive Workshop Series
• Communications and Leadership: Inseparable Issues
The requirements of an effective Leader are multiple-level; the ability to create and communicate the desired vision for the enterprise, determine the cultural environment in which it will thrive and perform, initiate the ideas for the strategy to be employed to secure a desired result, and successfully implement and execute the agendas that determine the planned-for achievement, growth and value.

How all of these vital requisites are “communicated” is the basis for this workshop, a “Communications makeover” for Senior Executives, Supervisors and Managers.

• Emotional Intelligence: Requisite For Outstanding Leadership Performance
Emotional Intelligence has become a critical issue in the new frontier of Management Leadership Development. This program explores in definitive detail what constitutes Emotional Intelligence, and the pathway to achieve what Emotional Intelligence offers to the successful individual who can learn, adopt, and PRACTICE PERFECTÓ this skill. This is a Strategic Issues Workshop that demands a certain level of intelligence and intellectual capacity.

• Leadership Development: Growing Leaders and Senior Executives
Enterprises seek out and depend upon people who have Leadership qualities, and who can use these valuable skills effectively. What is relevant about Leadership in an Inter-active Workshop setting is the ability to practice the new skills . . . without paying for the mistakes. Attendees should not have to pay for them the hard way in the real workplace situation . . . and/or, at the enterprise expense.

Leadership is a complex issue. When it is broken down into key parts, it becomes “understandable and digestible.” Attendees learn and practice skillful Leadership, in addition to the Leadership qualities they now possess.

• Women Of Color: Accomplishment based Executive Training
Recent valid surveys cited a lack of access to an effective Mentor/Coach as one barrier to advancement and indicate deprival for huge numbers of talented, knowledgeable, and professionally skilled Women of Color. This Workshop explains advancement technology and methods, and participants join with Teams of Peers to practice this new knowledge and advancement technology. The training provides for immediate application for the Workshop contents into each individual’s world-of-work, and a sharper, planned focus on career goals and related accomplishments.


Thinking Development Interactive Workshop Series

• Analytical Thinking: Developing and Harnessing The Workforce Brainpower
Critical Thinking Skills, as we see it, is remarkably different from most popular definitions. We believe it is the ability to develop and employ the Brainpower of an individual to think, create, innovate, and perform beyond their prior capabilities. The first realization is acknowledging the difference between ”acting smart” and “being smart.” Knowledge is what you learn in schools and life experiences; Wisdom is what you do with what you have learned! Reading books or “studying harder” will not resolve this issue. We borrow from The Wisdom SeriesÓ curriculum in a less complex, shorter version.

• Innovation: Preparing For tomorrow’s Challenges
The key to all future development and growth will be heavily dependent on Innovation Technology. Many individuals do have the ability to be innovative in degrees, but usually lack the fundamental knowledge and skills to unleash this great source of creative energy.
We instruct the attendees in a precise, extraordinary series of exercises in how to create and develop new and effective ideas, products or services.

• Learning Organizations: Magnets For The Best And Brightest Achievers
This Interactive Workshop explores in great detail what a Learning Organization truly represents, and how it functions on several levels in accomplishing its specified goals. The attendees plan and rehearse under supervision how to create and implement a Learning Organization in their enterprise environment. Skilled Productive trainers and skill/knowledge-based programs are required with Best Practices Sharing protocols.

• Mentoring And Coaching: Creating A True Learning Organization
Mentor/Coaching is a necessary Management Development tool essential for smart enterprise growth. The role of the Mentor/Coach in the total environment and specifically, the Team-Building Process is definitively explored as an effective yardstick to gauge future performance achievements.

• Presentation Skills Building: Successful Communications For Leadership
This Workshop instructs the individual in the ability to make effective and successful presentations from small meetings to keynote speeches to major addresses and covers all forms of media, especially use of a microphone and dais. Each individual receives personal and group instruction in the entire presentation process. Writing skills and digital technology issues are not included in this program.

• Soft Skills That Matter: Using Emotional Intelligence To Grow A Great Business
We live in a world where “transparency” is self-evident. Everyone takes notice of our personal and business conduct in enterprise affairs, anger management and conflict resolution, issues of sexual harassment, dining etiquette, and dress codes. This Workshop addresses behavior and issues that spell the critical difference between continuing levels of success, and stalling out for the wrong reasons

• The Six Thinking HatsÓ: The New Idea, Thinking and Communications Discovery
Edward de Bono’s “Six Hatsâ” (Registered trademark) is studied and practiced on an Inter-active basis, since it is a process of having every participant engaged in the same direction of thought in any form of group communications.

This program is the only key to infinitely more productive meetings, Team Development Strategy, and group dynamics outperforming any other methodology. A critical segment for Innovation, Best Practices Sharing, Group Think, and all forms of problem resolution activities.

The Fast Track Interactive Workshop Series

• Adult Employability Skills Workshop: For The Disadvantaged and Presently Unemployed
This Workshop is designed to prepare individuals who have been displaced by exiting businesses or industry sectors that are no longer viable employers for this level of the general manual labor Workforce. We do not yet focus on Job re-training, but on appropriately preparing the individual in successfully seeking new employment and career establishment utilizing their existing skill sets.

• Adult Entrepreneurship New Business Development: Individual/Local Economic Development
This Workshop is designed to prepare individuals who have been displaced by exiting businesses or industry sectors that are now ready to become a business owner rather than continue as an employee. All of the rudimentary protocols necessary for a new business startup covering the issues demanded of a initial two years of operations, and delivered in an Interactive Workshop setting.

• Do It Now: Procrastination Is A Corporate Liability
A comprehensive and highly charged program that focuses on why individuals procrastinate and put off addressing critical as well as casual, but necessary functions of responsibility. We first illustrate WHY this emotionally based activity occurs, then undertake a series of steps to create new behavioral activity to eliminate this common, but wasteful, costly enterprise and personal behavior characteristic.

• Entrepreneurship: Creating A Vision, And Delivering On Its Premise
Differentiating Entrepreneurship from Leadership is the primary issue in this Workshop. We explore and demonstrate the issues that manifest “The Internal Visioning Process.” Attendees write their observations for individual changes to be made to become effective Entrepreneurs, Leaders and Coaches. The Workshop covers positioning the enterprise, defining the corporate culture, and other critical methodologies.

• Foreign Trade: Introduction And Primer To Overseas Markets
A Workshop devoted to Import and Export marketing that focuses on researching international trade at critical levels, Cultural Awareness issues, and Government Assistance and implementation procedures for initiating an Import/Export Program. Methodologies are detailed, and the attendees are invited to share their plans and/or concerns as case studies for moving forward in this area of commerce.

• The MATF ProgramÓ: Internal Fast Track Communications Format
MATFÓ represents the term Management Advisory Task Force. This Workshop is a fast track to intra-business growth and achievement. We teach the methodology for the upstreaming of information throughout all levels of an organization, regardless of its size. The validity of this protocol is timely, precise, strategic feedback from every area of operations, transcending all levels of management. The MATFÓ also develops innovation, leadership and CHANGE issues more efficiently than other forms of implementation.

• The Trade Show Mentality: Projects Delivered On Time, Every Time!
This Workshop examines a critical function of every enterprise that suffers critical deadline failures without sacrificing quality, people, product, profits or value. This is a task oriented training format that instills key operational protocols of how projects are developed, maintained, and implemented so that all key objectives are met within a specified time frame.

• The Win-Win Career Start Program: Teen Employability Skills & Job Fair Preparation
This Workshop was developed to properly prepare High School Juniors and Seniors, the unemployed, and those seeking a career change; what they must precisely focus on and develop prior to the job search, implementing the Job search, and creating the foundation for successful Career Development. The program is “document rich,” comprehensive in interview technology, and many other requisites for an accomplishment based, Career origination effort. Win-Win represents Winning in starting a career, Winning at accomplishing a long-term goal.

Personal Coaching Services

Executive or personal Coaching at any level has a few primary objectives.

To create a forum of “reality” for the client;
To then aid in determining what a course of action is suitable;
To suggest alternatives relative to the suggested course of action to be taken;
To aid in choosing an alternative, and working through the implementation process;
To never forget whose needs are being served, first and foremost!

The famous author, Peter Senge (from the introduction to the book "Synchronicity" by Joe Jaworski), speaks loud and clear to this human condition:

"Most of us aren't very good at perceiving reality as it is. Most of what we "see" is shaped by our impressions, our history, our baggage, our preconceptions. We can't see people as they really are because we're too busy reacting to our own internal experiences of what they evoke in us, so we rarely actually relate to reality. We mostly relate to internal remembrances of our own history, stimulated and evoked by whatever is externally before us . . .

If we could only see reality more as it is, it would become obvious what we need to do. We wouldn't be acting out of our own histories, or our own needs, or our own purely reactive interpretations. We would see what is needed in the moment. We would do exactly what's required of us, right now, right here. This is … living one's life by "participating in the unfolding". You can't do that unless you can actually see what is right before you."
We Coach individuals to access the true value of their human capital, and take full advantage of valuable new technology, work processes, strategies, and other required methodologies. This is demanded in today’s competitive enterprise environment.

Knowledge (education and experience) integrated with Wisdom (smart decisions and choices) and finally, effective Execution! That is our Coaching agenda.

The famous scientist, Albert Einstein, stated so eloquently, that “it is insanity to do the same things over and over . . . and expect different results.”
The message is simple. If you want “things” to be different, you have to change what you do, why you do it, and how you do it!!

You must learn what you don’t know . . . and skillfully use what you do learn. You cannot make expert use of valuable traits you do not possess. New self-awareness, wisdom, knowledge, and strategies for planning, implementing, measuring accomplishments.

What you don’t know . . . creates a far greater risk to your future . . . than what you do know!

As a result of our Coaching services, you can become more focused on career goals and accomplishments. You can now possess the tools and the where-with-all to achieve what you are capable of achieving!

We look forward in earnest to hearing from you, and to energizing your career forward.

Are You a Stowaway on Your Ship of Life?

Tuesday, 20 January 2009



Og writes, “Yet I will not fail, as the others, for in my hands I now hold the charts which will guide me through perilous waters to shores which only yesterday seemed but a dream.” (scroll I)

Og Mandino describes his Ten Scrolls of time-tested ancient wisdom as “charts” we can use to navigate the perilous waters raging between where we are and where we want to be. What are these charts? What is the perilous water? And what are the shores?

Imagine Og standing on the helm of his ship, the captain of his destiny. Aloft he holds the charts of destiny containing a clear map of the principles of success. Around him rages a dark, portentous, stormy sea. Surging waves crash onto distant shores, which are lined with shipwrecks. The wind swirls, the sirens call yet Og stays true to the course. He knows where he wants to be and the charts are pointing the way, revealing the dangers and guiding the mariner.

In the darkness of today’s world and the storms of our own lives, we can learn so much from Og and his Scrolls. First we can learn that storms are part of life. No one who wants to travel the journey to success can avoid them. Second, we learn to stand at the helm of our own ships, holding our own charts of destiny high as we keep our eyes fixed on the goal while navigating the perilous waters. Third, we learn to trust that when we follow the principles of success we can reach the promised harbor. This is in such contrast to the pervasive purveyors of the “millionaire magic doctrine” who want us to believe that there is a fantasy fairy that will magically manifest this safe harbor if we but visualize with enough intention.

What does it take to become the captain of our own ship? What does it take to hold aloft the charts of success and hold close to our hearts that which guide us to success?

Og Mandino was born, like all of us, filled with infinite potential. Like all of us, he had hopes and dreams and a plan in place. But then life happened, like it does to all of us and he drifted from his plan. For Og, it was the death of his mother and the slow creep of failure that provided the impetus to take a stand.

He stopped by a local bar for just a quick nightcap, which quickly became a destructive habit and addiction. He was such a poor father and husband that his first wife and daughter left him and stayed estranged from him for the rest of his life. He lost his job because he did not perform and he lost himself to the pain and the desire to escape the pain. It got so bad that one dark night, he seriously contemplated buying a gun with the last of his money and ending his miserable wreck of a life.

Og spent years on the ship of his destiny, but not as the captain. He was the stowaway waiting for someone else to become captain, someone else to provide direction, someone else to do the work. Og was the dreamer, always thinking of great ways to use the talents and abilities he was given and then never actually doing anything. Og was the lookout, always keeping an eye on the horizon hoping someone else would steer the ship away from the rocks of failure and the storms of defeat.

Then suddenly, one day Og woke up. Suddenly Og, the homeless man with nothing to live for awoke from a deep sleep that had held him captive for the previous ten years. He woke up. He stopped waiting for someone else to do something for him and the stowaway became the captain. He stopped waiting for others to issue orders—he began to impose order in his own life and he became the captain – and a master mariner. He stopped living in the dream and began to take on his own life and so became the captain of his own destiny - finally facing the full rage of the storms of life and the rocks of his own failure and deciding from that day forward he would live differently.

He writes in Scroll I, “To create the olive, king of all trees, a hundred years is required. An onion plant is old in nine weeks. I have lived as an onion plant. It has not pleased me.”

What does he mean when he says that he had lived as an onion plant? One answer might be that he never stuck to a plan for long. Another might be that gave up easily. Another might be that he had been unwilling to invest in himself over the long term – he may have been looking for a quick and easy way. In an effort to avoid the “sting of the blade” he tried to escape and avoid the rigors of life. The result? Emptiness in his own heart. He longed for answers. He felt empty inside, jaded and hopeless. He had lived subject to the buffetings of life in hopes of avoiding the pain of taking on his own life only to realize he was filled with pain anyway – the bruises of failure and the wounds of mediocrity.

What is your heart telling you? Have you been a stowaway on your own ship of life? Have you lived as an onion plant and are now unpleased? Are you ready to become an olive tree—the king of all trees—and are you willing to begin the responsibility of taking on your own life and becoming an accountable captain of your own fate?

If you can honestly answer affirmatively that you want to take on your life and you are willing to do whatever it takes to be successful—congratulations! You are about to embark on the most exciting and the most amazing journey of your life! You are about to embark on the journey of making your dreams become reality by acting with confidence and living by principle! And this will bring you untold joy because you are now using your potential, exercising your ability and growing and becoming the real you.

This new course requires more of you than you have perhaps ever given. Leadership and success are rare qualities possessed by people who made a similar choice when faced with difficulty. They made the decision, invested in themselves and stayed the course. They embraced Og’s invitation to “develop my skills as the mariner develops his by learning to ride out the wrath of each storm.” You can be one of them.

It is natural if you find yourself wanting to go back to your old ways to find comfort in your old ruts. And it is only if you actually go back to your familiar life that you begin, once again, to live as an onion plant. To become the king of all trees requires a continuing effort to improve, to actively chart your own course and to live according to the principles of success.

Og writes elsewhere in Scroll I, “As a child, I was slave to my impulses; now I am slave to my habits, as are all grown men. I have surrendered my free will to the years of accumulated habits and the past deeds of my life have already marked out a path which threatens to imprison my future. My actions are ruled by appetite, passion, prejudice, greed, love, fear, environment, habit, and the worst of these tyrants is habit.”

Og had literally lived as an onion plant. He had run away from his responsibilities, from his opportunities, from his failures and tried to forget himself in an endless haze of alcohol. It could be said that he worked very hard to be the stowaway in his own life instead of becoming the captain.

Then something clicked inside him and he made a different choice. For him the choice was a complete 180 degree change in direction. As he made this choice he writes, “Failure will no longer be my payment for struggle. Failure, like pain, is alien to my life. In the past I accepted it as I accepted pain. Now I reject it and I am prepared for wisdom and principles which will guide me out of the shadows into the sunlight of wealth, position, and happiness far beyond my most extravagant dreams…”

Wisdom and Principles.

Take special note of these two words. Og realized that onion plants live unguided by principle and unaware of wisdom. They live within themselves and they live quickly and die quickly. The king of all trees is created over time, without haste and in accordance with both wisdom and principle.

Here at The Og Group, we know how dark the storms of life appear in today’s world. We know how frightening the storms can be. We know the dangers and also a little bit about a crash or two on the rocky shores. We also know how tempting it is to abdicate responsibility of your own ship of life to someone else. How tempting it is to hide out as the stowaway instead of reaching out to grasp the helm and take on these storms and navigate these crushing waves.

It is our mission to inspire and to elevate your efforts to take on your life. Og’s life appeared at one point to be worthless. He was a bum and worse, he was an alcoholic drunken bum who wandered from city to city escaping his own life and refusing to captain his own fate.

Yet he changed. He became something else, something magnificent – he become his real, genuine and authentic self. His words continue to give comfort to the lonely and advice to the lost. His impact on others is incalculable.

Imagine what you could do with your life and the powerful impact you could have on others as you courageously take on your life and become the captain of your destiny, following the time-tested principles found in Og’s Scrolls and in other great books.

We hope you will rise up and be counted in your own life. We hope you refuse with fury the efforts of others or life circumstances that may tempt you to go back into your comfort zone. We hope you reach out to others from a center of power, secure and rooted deep in principle and wisdom as the olive tree and as Og. As you do, you will find yourself at a place almost unimaginable, filled with unspeakable joy, over flowing with gratitude. You will be a skilled mariner – the captain of your destiny.

We are here to serve you in this decision and journey!