SALT LAKE CITY -- What is the measure of greatness in corporate America, and how does your company measure up?Outlook Leadership (formerly Outlook Conference) has secured the elusive author Jim Collins to address just that issue during the invitation-only event in Salt Lake City this August 7-10.
In an era of thousands of self-proclaimed business gurus, Collins, the author of Good to Great, has catapulted past the masses to achieve rock & roll icon status.But shunning the spotlight, Collins prefers the quiet sanctuary of his Boulder, Colo., campus, [image-nocss] rarely making public appearances; however, Collins agreed to address the elite executives of the convenience retailing and petroleum industry for an unconventional morning that will challenge conventional thought.
Collins will oversee the interactive Good to Great Round Table, bringing the entire assembly of leaders together to examine and solve issues facing their businesses.Afterward, Collins will moderate a Gold Medal Leadership Forum featuring Terry Carter, senior vice president of finance for QuikTrip Corp.; There DuPont, president of Wawa Inc.; Steve Sheetz, chairman at Sheetz Inc.; and Don Knauss, president and COO of Coca-Cola North America.
Carter told CSP Daily News that he looks forward to the opportunity to sit down with Collins. I think [Collin's book] is the best business book I've ever read. It's one of the few I keep in my office, he said. I think the best thing about it is it was not the solution du jour. What he talks about are things that were time-tested across all industry lines. It didn't matter what industry people were in or what type of company it was, whether an entrepreneurialship or a corporation. It's about things coming together and having management and ownership committed to doing those things over a long period of time. That, to me is a strategy and philosophy that I've tried to follow.
In his bestselling book, Collins looked at 1,435 good companies, charted their performance over a 40-year timeframe and ended up with only 11 great companies.
How did those 11 companies reach greatness?Among other attributes:
They avoided celebrity CEOs who tended to seek their own ambition in lieu of the company's greatness. Before they did anythinganything!they filled their companies with the best possible people they could find.Everything else will follow.Outlook Leadership will also have presentations on Wal-Mart's encroachment through 2010, an appearance by the legendary Harvey Mackay (author of Swim With the Sharks) and experiential learning activities for executives at Salt Lake's Olympic Park, including bobsled training, wheeled street luge and the amazing Flying Aces Aerial Show.
We listened to the marketplace and moved our event from November to August, making it the fall kickoff for the industry, said Paul Reuter, president and editorial director of Oak Brook, Ill.-based CSP Information Group, the founding sponsor of the conference.And we felt it was critical that our brand reflect the executives who gather year after year, so we changed the conference name to Outlook Leadership.
Online registration is now open for the invitation-only Outlook Leadership, August 7-10, at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City.More information is available by contacting Bryn Cotton at (800) 889-8377 or emailing him at bcotton@leadershipsite.com.The complete conference agenda can be found at www.outlookconference.com.
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