The past few weeks have been quite exciting for me and my company:
a) Stop Selling! and First-Class Leadership programs now available in Chinese
I found two new associates, Tan Chew Yen and Diane Chan who will help me develop Cantonese and Mandarin versions of our First-Class Leadership and Stop Selling! programs. At present, we work out the association agreement and I've started with a train-the-trainer program for them.
With Chew Yen, I'll be able to provide bi-lingual (English/Cantonese and English/Mandarin) versions right away as Chew Yen is a qualified translator.
Being able to cater for the Chinese speaking market, will enable us to take Progress-U to the next level.
b) Website Update
Please visit our re-designed home page http://www.progressu.com.hk and give us your comments
c) New Strategic Partnership with SGS
The Hong Kong / China branch of SGS, a world leader in testing and certification, recently started to expand their offers to include soft skills training. Progress-U started a collaboration with SGS in this area and will provide leadership and sales training services for programs organized by SGS.
d) Manuscript Evaluation
The first two experts have given me their feedback which is quite encouraging:
1) Marshall Goldsmith
In his email to me he said that he liked my book and allowed me to use the following endorsement:
"A great guide for building collaborative leadership in today’s rapidly changing world."
Marshall Goldsmith, considered by Forbes to be one of the five most-respected executive coaches. He is co-editor or author of 19 books including "The Leader of the Future" and "Coaching for Leadership".
2) Mick Bennett
"I enjoyed the book and the anecdotal style. There are lots of suggestions and distinctions that leaders will find useful. The Groupness Factor may well create a stimulus for them to look at themselves, their behavior and quality of leadership."
Mick Bennett, Managing Director of Hewitt's Asia-Pacific operations. He is co-author of "Leadership & Talent in Asia - How the Best Employers Deliver Extraordinary Performance".
My further schedule for publishing seems now quite fixed. If nothing important goes wrong, The Groupness Factor should be readily available in the market in the course of August 2005. I'm excited to be so close to the target. Thanks to all who supported me so far in this special project.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Saturday, May 07, 2005
Winning Experts
Sorry, haven't been posting for a while, perhaps I was too busy with my upcoming book, developing my still young business, etc.
Talking about my book, things got a bit delayed (any surprise?), unfortunately. I hope to get it published by July 05 - let's see how that works out. After having received very valuable input from my friends and business partners for improvement of my first draft, I finally completed the second draft some 2 weeks ago.
Luckily, I could find 4 internationally renowned leadership experts (click on their name to learn more about them) who are ready to give me their evaluation of my 2nd draft.
1) Marshall Goldsmith (considered by FORBES to be one of the top 5 executive coaches in the US, co-author of several books on leadership)
2) Mick Bennett (co-author of "Leadership & Talent in Asia" published in 2004)
3) Jean-Francois Manzoni (co-author of "The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome" published in 2002)
4) Roz Usheroff (leadership coach and author, known in N-America for her expertise in leadership etiquette)
I hope to get their feed-foward by the end of May so that I can finalize the manuscript in early June. Publishing could follow a good month after.
You might wonder how I got these rather famous people to do this for me? It seems too simple to be true: by asking. Last year I engaged Herbert Lee, a professional public speaker to help me improve my presentation skills. He kept saying: "Don't be timid. Ask in a friendly and respectful manner and you'll be surprised how people are willing to help you. This is even more true for many of the very successful people." So I did. Did everybody I contacted offer their help? No, of course not. Those who didn't, were either too swamped with other obligations, or had health issues or whatever. Did anybody brush me off? Not at all. All responses I got were extremely friendly and polite. Did everybody respond? No, but I have the impression that the response rate was much higher than when I send 'cold' emails to potential business partners.
If you are interested in having a glance at an excerpt of this book, visit "The Groupness Factor - How to Achieve a Corporate Success Culture through First-Class Leadership". Your comments are always welcome! Email me at charlie.lang@progressu.com.hk
Talking about my book, things got a bit delayed (any surprise?), unfortunately. I hope to get it published by July 05 - let's see how that works out. After having received very valuable input from my friends and business partners for improvement of my first draft, I finally completed the second draft some 2 weeks ago.
Luckily, I could find 4 internationally renowned leadership experts (click on their name to learn more about them) who are ready to give me their evaluation of my 2nd draft.
1) Marshall Goldsmith (considered by FORBES to be one of the top 5 executive coaches in the US, co-author of several books on leadership)
2) Mick Bennett (co-author of "Leadership & Talent in Asia" published in 2004)
3) Jean-Francois Manzoni (co-author of "The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome" published in 2002)
4) Roz Usheroff (leadership coach and author, known in N-America for her expertise in leadership etiquette)
I hope to get their feed-foward by the end of May so that I can finalize the manuscript in early June. Publishing could follow a good month after.
You might wonder how I got these rather famous people to do this for me? It seems too simple to be true: by asking. Last year I engaged Herbert Lee, a professional public speaker to help me improve my presentation skills. He kept saying: "Don't be timid. Ask in a friendly and respectful manner and you'll be surprised how people are willing to help you. This is even more true for many of the very successful people." So I did. Did everybody I contacted offer their help? No, of course not. Those who didn't, were either too swamped with other obligations, or had health issues or whatever. Did anybody brush me off? Not at all. All responses I got were extremely friendly and polite. Did everybody respond? No, but I have the impression that the response rate was much higher than when I send 'cold' emails to potential business partners.
If you are interested in having a glance at an excerpt of this book, visit "The Groupness Factor - How to Achieve a Corporate Success Culture through First-Class Leadership". Your comments are always welcome! Email me at charlie.lang@progressu.com.hk
Monday, January 31, 2005
Perhaps the most exciting journey in my life
Having traveled to over 60 countries, it is easy to imagine that I was lucky enough to experience quite few exciting journeys in different parts of this world.
Well, the journey which I have been embarking on today is indeed special, it is the exciting adventure of authoring my first book which I am determined to complete this Spring only.
The Book Title will most likely be "The Groupness Factor" plus some subtitle I am not sure about yet. It will be an unusual book about leadership for several reasons. First, I discovered the key concept of groupness in a book which has basically nothing to do with leadership. It is in fact a book about the effects of different rearing styles applied on children. While reading about the concept of groupness it struck me like a lightening! I realized that groupness is so very present in our adult life and we are simply not aware of it.
What I found is that first-class leaders subconsciously create groupness in a productive way while less effective leaders either let groupness happen randomly with a big risk of being unproductve or unconsciously distroy existing positive groupness.
Ever since I read about this concept, I am greatly amazed that - to my knowledge - no-one ever came up with this concept to be applied to leadership development. And yet it is so obvious, once you are aware, that making proper use of the groupness factor can make a huge difference in any organization.
Besides my own corporate experience and experience in coaching executives, I will use other trustable research results to further validate my findings. I also plan to give a clear description of what it takes to achieve successful change, knowing that understanding it and doing it certainly are of different qualities.
My target is to complete the first manuscript by mid-February, then get it edited and critically read by 5-10 test readers. Using their feedback, I'll work on an improved version which I hope to get ready by mid March 05. Then I hope there will be only some fine-tuning left so that I could go for publishing in April 05.
With a little luck, I'll have my first own book in my hands by the end of April 05.
Let's keep the fingers crossed that I will achieve my ambitious goal. The journey has begun! Contact me if you want to join me.
Well, the journey which I have been embarking on today is indeed special, it is the exciting adventure of authoring my first book which I am determined to complete this Spring only.
The Book Title will most likely be "The Groupness Factor" plus some subtitle I am not sure about yet. It will be an unusual book about leadership for several reasons. First, I discovered the key concept of groupness in a book which has basically nothing to do with leadership. It is in fact a book about the effects of different rearing styles applied on children. While reading about the concept of groupness it struck me like a lightening! I realized that groupness is so very present in our adult life and we are simply not aware of it.
What I found is that first-class leaders subconsciously create groupness in a productive way while less effective leaders either let groupness happen randomly with a big risk of being unproductve or unconsciously distroy existing positive groupness.
Ever since I read about this concept, I am greatly amazed that - to my knowledge - no-one ever came up with this concept to be applied to leadership development. And yet it is so obvious, once you are aware, that making proper use of the groupness factor can make a huge difference in any organization.
Besides my own corporate experience and experience in coaching executives, I will use other trustable research results to further validate my findings. I also plan to give a clear description of what it takes to achieve successful change, knowing that understanding it and doing it certainly are of different qualities.
My target is to complete the first manuscript by mid-February, then get it edited and critically read by 5-10 test readers. Using their feedback, I'll work on an improved version which I hope to get ready by mid March 05. Then I hope there will be only some fine-tuning left so that I could go for publishing in April 05.
With a little luck, I'll have my first own book in my hands by the end of April 05.
Let's keep the fingers crossed that I will achieve my ambitious goal. The journey has begun! Contact me if you want to join me.
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