Bob Schultek

Bob has more than 30 years of service as a senior sales and business development executive, CEO and business owner. His expertise includes customer-partnered business development, strategic planning, sales management, customer service, operational alignment, lean process analysis and improvement, quality assurance, and performance management. He has worked in the energy, medical device, bioscience & pharmaceutical, discrete and process manufacturing, packaging and distribution, communications and information technology, and business-to-business service industries.

Proposing Investments, not Transactions

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How you respond to a prospect’s inquiry determines their first impression about your company and how you do business. It’s your initial, perhaps only, opportunity to differentiate yourself in their eyes.  Reacting with urgency is essential, but promptly proposing a product or service to address their immediate pain, without first seeking to learn why resolving the problem is important, wastes an opportunity to reveal your organization’s experience and competency, and your genuine interest in their success. Your proposal will …

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Adapting to Customer Centricity

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Bob Schultek Author of  The Gauntlet In this increasingly customer-centric market, here are some organizational issues to consider: To generate growth, profitability and sustainability, ensuring that a business is continually creating strategic value for customers is a primary responsibility for leadership. Creating value for the business begins by first creating value for customers; customer value is monetized to validate its contribution to business value. To reliably create strategic value and strengthen sustainability, the business: –Discovers what customers value, …

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Creating Value

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  Our time is a finite, unrecoverable resource which makes it very valuable. As a leader, precious time is expected to create value for the organization. Did your leadership help your people create value today? What benefits were produced for your customers and your organization in return for the time you and they invested? Ford’s Model T was more efficient to build than any other automobile at the time, so each worker produced far more value …

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5 Keys For Teams That Move Faster

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Bob Schultek Author of  The Gauntlet Profitable growth relies upon the preservation of enduring customer relationships. Sustaining these relationships demands that a business consistently produce more strategic value for a key customer than can be gained elsewhere – value that contributes to the customer’s progress. A key factor in creating strategic value is moving faster – faster in delivering results, adapting to changing needs, and innovating. When Google wanted to move faster, they formed small, cross-functional teams to …

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5 Attributes That Drive Strategy Execution

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Bob Schultek Author of The Gauntlet The start of a new year often marks the launch or refinement of strategy. Inherent in this process is change, acting in a new or different way. To execute a new strategy, leaders must identify advocates, change agents who work within the current system, and have the ability and will to drive the change necessary for the strategy to succeed. A key characteristic for strategy advocates is their capacity for critical thinking. In …

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Questions to Ponder

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Bob Schultek Author of  The Gauntlet The holiday season can be hectic, but as the last year morphs into the new one, there are also rare, quiet moments that are opportunities for reflection. Take advantage of these occasions – from experience, you know that they will be much harder to find once your active work schedule again beckons. What were you able to accomplish last year? What worked, and what didn’t? Why is that? How …

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Two Points That Make Performance Discussions Matter

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Bob Schultek Author of The Gauntlet With the year-end approaching, ’tis the season of performance evaluations. Some organizations have abandoned the regimen of formal performance discussions, while others preserve a review process, often replacing annual discussions with quarterly or semi-annual ones. Opinions and rationales vary about the value of these individual assessments. But in this age of perpetual change, with its organizational demands for greater agility, innovation and improvement, the case for observing some performance management protocol is …

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Winning in the Customer-Driven Market

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Bob Schultek Author of  The Gauntlet Businesses today operate in a customer-driven market. Everyone and everything is connected, everywhere and all the time. It’s a world of rapid and unpredictable change in which organizations are constantly adapting to meet evolving customers’ needs, never reaching a steady operating state. It’s a time that challenges the historical devotion to organizational bureaucracy as a means for improving results, placing conformity above all other cultural values at the cost of inhibiting initiative and imagination. Many companies believe …

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The Inspiration Equation

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Bob Schultek Author of The Gauntlet Every change initiative is met with resistance is met with resistance from critics, skeptics and hold outs. And since change requires an investment of additional time and energy, above and beyond specific functional duties, people cannot be compelled to change; they must be inspired to accept the challenge of what must be done. John Maxwell, in his book  “Everyone Communicates, Few Connect,” describes how this inspiration depends first on communicating a message that connects with those …

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Are You Preparing for the “Age of Agility?”

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Bob Schultek Author of The Gauntlet In their book, “The Age of Agility,” authors Jason Gaulden and Alan Gottlieb describe how “we are in the early stages of a rapidly accelerating revolution that will bring automation and artificial intelligence into sectors of the workforce that have, until now, been spared this latest wave of disruptive change.” Corporate executives, academics, technologists, and economists agree that this disruption “will rival any technological upheaval in history in both scope and impact.” …

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