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Dr. Michelli presents on a wide variety of topics and customizes his presentations for your business or organization's needs.

• Maintaining Hope, Focus and Humor In Challenging Times:
  Borrowing from his experiences with companies such as Southwest Airlines, The World Famous Pike Place Fish Market, and Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, Dr. Michelli shows you how a mirthful attitude functions as a shock absorber on bumpy economic roads. In addition to offering strategies that individuals can easily apply so that they refocus from fear to productive action, Dr. Michelli identifies ways to create playful corporate cultures that attracts and retain the best workers. Get ready to learn how to adaptively regain personal control in adversity, celebrate your co-workers and customers while also increasing your profitability through humor and play.
  
  
• Reducing Anxiety and Refocusing on the Basics:
  Anxiety and fear often immobilize otherwise effective organizations and individuals. Rather than increasing clarity, focus, and execution, anxiety often produces confusion, distraction, and inactivity. Dr. Michelli’s presentation offers concrete approaches that turn challenges into strengthened strategic objectives, improved teamwork, and heightened business success. Having studied small and international businesses that have thrived in adversity, Dr. Michelli shares time-tested insights from both leaders and empowered individual employees.
  
  
• Differentiating Yourself from the Competition – a Low Cost/High Touch Approach:
  With changing consumer behavior, businesses frequently find themselves reducing marketing and training budgets. In many cases, the workforce itself has had to be trimmed. So how can a company maintain the loyalty of its best employees and its customer base when resources are limited? Dr. Michelli emphasizes cost neutral strategies for creating memorable and transformational staff and customer experiences. Whether it is through sharing “wow service” stories, offering “just –in –time training” ,or increasing “collaborative problem-solving,” Dr. Michelli helps employee’s at all levels of an organization understand how service excellence (directed to subordinates, co-workers, and customers) is a low cost/high touch approach to brand differentiation and long-term business sustainability.
  
  
• The New Gold Standard:
  Leadership Principles for Creating Legendary Customer Experiences (based on Dr. Michelli’s book of the same name) – In this presentation, Dr. Michelli examines how to deliver legendary customer experiences such as those offered by The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. The New Gold Standard presents cutting edge leadership strategies for selection, training, and retention of the “right” staff. It demonstrates how leaders can drive staff engagement and ownership behavior which ultimately produces transformational customer experiences. Additionally, The New Gold Standard examines strategies for keeping your business relevant to changing customer needs and shifting economic times.
  
  
• The Road to Practical Innovation
  Innovation is a daunting word. In this presentation, Dr. Michelli demystifies the innovative process. By exploring the inside (ideas of staff) and outside (benchmarking other businesses) lanes, Dr. Michelli demonstrates how your business can gain a competitive advantage in creative product development and service delivery. Dr. Michelli shows how to effectively elicit and implement staff-generated ideas while also looking for best practices both inside and outside of your industry. Dr. Michelli offers structured and advanced innovation strategies that lead to results-based breakthroughs.
  
  
• The Art of Anticipation
  Fulfilling customers’ needs leads to satisfied customers; but satisfied customers are a discount coupon away from being lured away by a competitor. Dr. Michelli examines distinctions between service that is based on the concept of fulfilling a stated customer need versus one that is dedicated to anticipating the unstated needs of those you serve. He further shares ways for service professionals to know how to improvise to produce wow experiences that are consistent with overarching business objectives.
  
  
• Service Professionalism – Elevating the Bar
  Service cultures don’t happen by accident. To elevate the bar of service to a new standard, Dr. Michelli shares how businesses such as The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and the Pike Place Fish Market enculturate service professionalism and celebrate service excellence. By showing how effective leaders manage outcomes of extraordinary service, Dr. Michelli demonstrates how to produce constructive empowerment and a culture where individuals take pride in the art, skill, and benefits of serving others.
  
  
• The Starbucks Experience: Lessions in Leadership to Spark YOU and Your Business to Unimaginable Success
  How did the Starbucks Coffee and Tea Company grow from a single store in Seattle, Washington to a business opening six new stores a day? Borrowing from his Wall Street Journal best selling book, The Starbucks Experience, Dr. Michelli shares 5 principles that will help you generate employee retention, empowerment and enviable customer loyalty. When a focus on transactions and customer satisfaction just won't do --- explore a world where "everything matters" and companies are "beloved."
  
  
• The Starbucks Way: Creating the Total Customer Experience
  By strategically focusing and executing on the details of the internal and external customer experience, Starbucks has become an employer and coffee provider of choice. In essence, Starbucks has become a name synonymous with coffee itself. While most people see Starbucks as a coffee company that serves people, its success is based on the inverse. It is a people company serving coffee. In this keynote or workshop, Dr. Michelli shows frontline workers and business leaders how to “stage” and perform on their brand’s promise. He analyzes the importance of identifying a desired emotional connection with the customer. Further, Dr. Michelli helps participants see the important distinction between “good” and “bad” profit. Lights, camera, action – the experience awaits.
  
  
• From the Ordinary into the Extraordinary: Lessons for Growing People and Business
  Starbucks took an extremely ordinary product and revolutionized the way people perceive and experience it. The Pike Place Fish Market has not only changed the way fish are sold but has innovated a business approach referred to as the "Fish Philosophy." Just as Starbucks has transformed the coffeehouse experience, so too can you maximize your "ordinariness" for positive impact, organizationally and in your communities. Examine how cutting edge leadership and front line workers can make a consistently extraordinary difference -- on and off the job.
  
  
• When Fish Fly - When Fish Fly shares insights into the underlying principles and amazing transformation of the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market. Excerpting from his book of the same name, Dr. Michelli reels in the complete fish story examining core principles that create Pike Place Fish’s uniquely vital and creative culture. A culture that leads to excellent customer service, legendary employee morale, a fun and energized work environment, and ultimately makes a “World Famous” difference in the lives of those they serve. This presentation offers a cohesive strategy for achieving world famous results for owners, managers, front-line workers, and customers alike. If Pike Place Fish can achieve world fame from a small storefront, with zero advertising in a smelly, physically arduous profession, just think what is possible for your company!
  
  
• Change or Die! Securing Maximum Innovation and Staff Engagement
  This presentation examines the primary drivers of change in the technological age. It demonstrates ways to establish flexible service and quality standards while encouraging the sharing of unique ideas and talents of employees. By making important leadership distinctions between "being" and "doing", Dr. Michelli offers a fun yet practical approach to infusing greater employee vitality, ownership and fun. It helps participants utilize essential strategies for seizing opportunities in a rapidly changing world.
  
  
• Enjoying Life to the Fullest by Capturing the Naturally Occurring Humor of Reality
  Have you noticed that not everyone is amused by the challenges of living. In a world filled with depression, burnout and despair, it is clear that few have developed a perspective which makes the human experience enjoyable. This workshop reviews simple attitude and perspective shifts which can provide shock absorption on the bumpy road of life. It emphasizes that it is not the events of life that matter but the emotional choices we make in response to them.
  
  
• Balancing Life through Play and Laughter
  Borrowing from improvisational comedy, magic, juggling, mime, and music, Dr. Michelli explores playful strategies for finding more joy in your life. The importance of having a playful heart in a hectic world is emphasized.
  
  
• Management Doesn’t Work
  Admiral Grace Hooper once said “Manage things...lead people.” In the ever changing world of business, management may get things done right but leadership is about doing the right thing. In this keynote, Dr. Michelli examines important distinctions between leadership and management. He will explore the challenges of being a proactive strategic leader when most people are pulled toward reactive operational management. Borrowing from success principles in businesses as diverse as Starbucks or the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market, Dr. Michelli will offer practical ideas to spark greater visionary leadership.