Volkmar Volzke is a rare peak performance consultant, coach, and speaker who helps his clients achieve breakthrough performance gains in the shortest time possible. He partners with senior business executives to create sustained momentum for strategy execution, drive change projects to get results, and inspire employees for success. He has helped implement strategies, change corporate cultures, and improve performance at a full spectrum of organizations, including start-ups, mid-size companies, not-for-profit organizations, and Fortune 500 corporations.
He has over twenty years of professional experience in different business roles, including strategic advisor and senior controller for large companies such as SAP and Siemens. He has managed strategy implementation and performance improvement projects in more than fifteen European countries, as well as set up operational improvement programs in Japan, the United States, and Latin America.
Through his popular weekly memos in English and German, he continuously provides fresh, thought-provoking ideas to a dynamic community of business executives throughout Europe and North America. He is a regular expert author for a number of Swiss business magazines on topics of strategy, leadership, motivation, innovation, customer focus, and operational performance.
How did we get to a place where everyone wants this information? First of all recognize that it was gradual. It's taken our business model decades to get this broken. One of the primary problems is that we are constantly interrupted. Open door policies, direct phone lines, cell phones, emails, texts, tweets, not to mention folks sticking their heads in and saying "Got a minute?" All together the average business person receives 340 requests for their time and energy every day!
The best people train their mental and physical bodies constantly; the best organizations do so as well. In congruence to personal fitness, we call this state of high performance "business fitness".
Most organizations' workers cite lack of good leadership as a key area for improvement. Weak leadership causes a number of other problems, such as uncertainty among the staff, a culture of blame instead of accountability, frequent changes in directions, a low innovation rate, and a lack of communality. At the end of the day, organizations with weak leadership face higher business risks, slower growth, and lower profitability than those that have excellent leadership in place.
Despite all available knowledge and thousands of books about customer centricity, customer focus, customer intimacy, and similar terms, there is still a tremendous gap between this knowledge and the reality in most organizations.