Strategic Thinking and Stakeholder Engagement: Fortune 500

Your ability to master strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement best practices will determine whether you reach your business and career goals in our increasingly-disrupted post-COVID future of work.

Yet traditional advice to "go with your gut" in strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement scenarios so often leads to disasters that devastate company bottom lines and bring down high-flying careers, as revealed by research in behavioral economics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. So what are the best practices used by the leaders of Fortune 500 companies to make the right calls in even the toughest strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement scenarios to maximize company bottom lines and advance their own careers?

These leaders recognize that science has revealed how our typical approach to strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement situations suffers from systematic dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases. These mental blindspots often lead us into strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement disasters that drastically undermine our desired outcomes and goals. Fortunately, recent scholarship has shown effective yet counterintuitive strategies to enable you to defeat these cognitive biases and help optimize your bottom line and your career. In this course, you will learn about and address these dangerous judgment errors, while mastering techniques for all types of strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement scenarios. You will draw on cutting-edge behavioral science and real-world best practices from Fortune 500 company leaders to help you and your teams reach your professional goals.

After taking this course, you will:

• Master strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement best practices used by Fortune 500 leaders to seize competitive advantage for their bottom line and career

• Free yourself of constant ruminations, numerous grey zones, and blindspots that plague strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement skills, blocking your goal achievement

• Develop a plan with specific next steps to adapt for yourself the best practices used by Fortune 500 leaders for strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement scenarios

• Discover the dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases that lead to strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement disasters for your business objectives

• Maximize your desired outcomes by defeating cognitive biases via science-based strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement techniques used by Fortune 500 leaders

• Feel truly confident about whether you made the right call in strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement scenarios to reach your business and career goals

Sounds too good to be true? These methods were successfully used by Aflac, Applied Materials, Entergy, Honda, IBM, JLL, Reckitt, Wells Fargo, and Xerox to dramatically improve the skills of their top executives, senior VPs, middle managers, and lower-level supervisors in strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement scenarios. Over the last two decades, I trained the leaders at these Fortune 500 companies, as well as at numerous middle-market companies and quickly-growing startups as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. The secrets used by these companies will be revealed in this course.

Here’s a recent testimonial from John Elnitsky, the head of the nuclear division of Entergy, a company ranked #299 by Fortune, speaking about the impact of my training on the leaders of the nuclear industry:

• “We at Entergy hired Dr. Gleb as the opening keynote speaker to set the tone for the annual nuclear utility industry conference, hoping he would give a wake-up call about the threats and risks facing us and what steps we can take to prepare. Well, what he delivered exceeded our expectations. His keynote was the talk of the conference, widely described by attendees as giving the nuclear industry ‘the kick in the pants we needed to jump-start critically important initiatives to address the threats he outlined.’ Thank you Dr. Gleb!”

Here’s a recent testimonial from Harish Phadke, the Business Manager for the head of the North American Health division at Reckitt, a company ranked #326 by Fortune, about the impact of my training on the Reckitt North American Health Leadership Team:

• “Dr. Gleb Tsipursky provided a truly outstanding virtual training on unconscious bias and future-proofing via emotional and social intelligence for the Reckitt North American Health Leadership Team. Exceeding our expectations, Dr Gleb customized his groundbreaking, behavioral science-driven training content to integrate our initiatives, policies, and case studies at Reckitt, expertly targeting our evolving needs. We are delighted to have met Dr. Gleb, and look forward to future opportunities to keep working with him on a training series for the organization. I highly recommend him for anyone who wants to get a rapid grasp of highly relevant topics which influence human behavior in the prevailing challenging times.”

Here's another recent testimonial by Susan Winchester, the Chief Human Resource Officer at Applied Materials, a Fortune 200 high-tech manufacturing company:

· “Hi, I'm Susan Winchester, and it's my delight and pleasure to tell you a little bit about our experience with Dr. Gleb. He had a big positive impact at Applied Materials. Our leaders and engineers love data-based, research-based insights, which is exactly what he brings. He hit it out of the park, and he used a team led process, which was incredibly engaging. He introduced us to a concept he created called asynchronous brainstorming. It was a process we used with hundreds and hundreds of leaders globally at the same time. We did this during our CEO kickoff session for our strategy work. In a very short amount of time, we were able to get great benefits. I also love the work he's doing to educate leaders around the power and positive benefits of hybrid and virtual working. And one of his techniques that I'm planning to use is what he calls “virtual coworking”, where you and as many coworkers as you'd like create a virtual meeting, no purpose or agenda, but rather just to be working with one another. I highly endorse Dr. Gleb's work with leadership teams.”

Besides such real-world, pragmatic expertise, I have a strong academic background as a behavioral scientist studying strategic thinking, stakeholder engagement, and related fields. I spent 8 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, first getting a PhD in the History of Behavioral Science and then serving as a lecturer there. Then, I spent 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, where I published dozens of peer-reviewed articles on this topic in high-quality academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology. Thus, this course is thoroughly informed by cutting-edge research.

This combination of business and science led to my expertise gaining global recognition. I published over 650 articles and gave over 550 interviews to prominent venues. They include Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Fox News, USA Today, CBS News, CNBC, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and Fortune.

Further attesting to my global renown, my work was translated into Chinese, German, Russian, Korean, Polish, Spanish, French and other languages.

That's what you can expect in this course: methods used successfully by leaders at the biggest companies to seize competitive advantage for their bottom lines and careers, thoroughly informed by cutting-edge research, and featured in top media venues and best-selling books around the globe.

Course Content and Structure Overview

• The course is self-paced, consisting of modules which the participants can complete any time they want.

• For each module, participants in the course will first read book chapters from the textbook. Then, participants will answer questions in the book chapters. Each chapter has references for additional readings that participants are invited to check out for additional context on any concepts about which they wish to learn more.

• Next, participants will watch the video for each segment, which uses case studies to apply the content of the readings to real-life scenarios.

• After each video, the participants should journal for 20-30 minutes to answer the questions in the prompts.

This is an intermediate-level course: at least a year of real-world professional experience is required to appreciate the strategies and case studies outlined in the class.

I look forward to welcoming you into the world of evidence-based, science-driven techniques tested in the real world of many Fortune 500 companies and numerous middle-market companies. To ensure that you master the best practices of Fortune 500 companies to help yourself seize competitive advantage for your bottom line and career in strategic thinking and stakeholder engagement skills, register now!