Inflect

In this episode, Michael Daehne and Biron Pickens, Vice President of Organization Effectiveness and Change Leadership at McKesson, discuss culture and ways to effectively lead an organization through change.

Biron has an impressive background in change management, including time at Amdocs, Nieman Marcus, Southwest Airlines, and now McKesson. Biron shares lessons he’s learned in leadership and cultivating a rich culture from employers like Southwest. Additionally, Biron and Michael discuss the implications of Artificial Intelligence and other technological advancements for people and how organizations can best prepare for these looming changes. 

In the lightning round, Bir...

Michael Daehne goes behind the scenes of preparing for business transformation with FlexPoint business readiness experts Pedro Cortez and Liz Pryor. 

This conversation builds on a three-part blog series on making the most of the on-ramp to major programs, including preparing the team, defining the transformation, and preparing for transformation.

Liz and Pedro add color to the recommendations based on their experience in consolidating tools in a merger, building custom software, leading major transformation programs, and more. You’ll hear what has worked well for them, as well as natural tensions to navigate throughout business tra...

Michael Daehne is joined by Amy Mills, fellow animal lover and CEO of Emancipet, a veterinary care non-profit.

Amy reflects on her tenure at Emancipet, sharing about her journey transitioning from youth service to veterinary care and into leadership at a rapidly growing non-profit. Amy explains Emancipet’s mission to address the access-to-care gap that 60 million pets are challenged by in America. Amy also shares about Emancipet’s large cultural shift when expanding beyond only spay/ neuter services to provide more holistic veterinary care for pets in need. 

There’s no doubt that Amy has had an...

Michael Daehne is joined William Wu, fellow Longhorn, public accountant, and expense optimization aficionado. 

William describes his path from public accounting to management consulting focused on ERP implementations and then to expense optimization consulting, sharing lessons learned from across his expertise. He then takes us behind the scenes at his firm, Expense Reduction Analysts, and talks through the process of assessing, baselining, and optimizing spend.

William’s passion for coaching his son’s baseball team shines through near the end of the episode, which is particularly delightful.

Find transcripts and more episo...

In this episode, Michael Daehne talks with Ben Rogers, Assistant Professor of Management and Organization at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, where he teaches and conducts research around management and organizational behavior. 

They discuss Ben’s research around the meaning of work and narratives in the workplace, and specifically how the hero’s journey is a way for us all to find meaning in our work. He shares how using the seven hero’s journey elements that he and fellow researchers identified – protagonist, shift, quest, allies, challenge, transformation, and legacy – can apply from large-scale business tr...

Kim Ehrman takes the mic from Michael Daehne to share what barbecue and business transformation have in common – and what we can learn from their similarities. 

Since at FlexPoint, we care deeply about both barbecue and business transformation, and excelling in them can be tricky, we compiled five lessons that apply to both. They include:

Make a plan before you light the fire. Keep it simple, stupid. Measure, monitor, and adjust. Pack your patience and survive the stall. Don't over-index on the sauce. 

We hope this playful comparison will equip you for success in one or both...

In this episode, Michael Daehne talks with Dan McDermott, Chief Information Officer at Tank Holding Corp., about lessons learned from mergers and acquisitions and Dan’s unique philosophy on managing and developing talent.

Dan shares his four principles of performance management, which guide him in selecting, managing, and developing talent:

Do you make good commitments and do you keep them? Do you improve the process, the way we do things, or the practice area?How do you improve yourself? How do you take care of your own development (and that of your team)?How do you sho...

In this episode, Michael Daehne, Founder and CEO of FlexPoint Consulting, talks with Shikhar Singh, Enterprise Solutions Lead at Copy.ai. 

Shikhar describes how the team at Copy.ai has built and personally used generative AI tools not just to boost productivity but to solve new business challenges. 

He invites us all to ask: if capacity weren't a constraint, what would your 2024 business plan look like? What initiatives would you put on the list? And how would you go about tackling these initiatives with the benefit of generative AI? 

 

Mentioned<...

To celebrate the second anniversary of FlexPoint Consulting, the FlexPoint team turns the microphone on Michael Daehne, Founder and CEO, for an ask-me-anything episode.

Michael fields questions about his entrepreneurial journey and the first two years of running FlexPoint. The group also discusses working through common challenges in business transformation. Then we close with a lightning round of more casual questions.

MENTIONED

--- Books & Podcasts ---
The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek: https://simonsinek.com/books/the-infinite-game/
HBR IdeaCast: https://hbr.org/2018/01/podcast-ideacast
How I Built This with...

In a special mini episode of Inflect, Kim Ehrman, Director of Business Transformation, makes a special announcement from the FlexPoint Consulting team.

The new FlexPoint Community Investment program includes three unique ways for non-profit and community organizations to receive strategic consulting, totally free of charge:

Schedule up to two hours per month of pro bono strategic advisory sessions with a FlexPoint leaderApply for one of our four free strategic planning workshops per year, a great enabler for a board planning sessionRequest a pro bono project within any of our core service offerings, on a flexible timeframe<...