Rethinking Competitive Advantage With Your Board—Ram Charan, Business Consultant, Author, CEO Advisor

Outthinker Strategy Network members will automatically receive a calendar invitation and details how to join this event.

Virtual roundtable date: September 28, 2021 from 12pm-2pm EST.

When it comes to working with a board of directors, strategists are often frustrated by the board’s “play-it-safe” mentality. In this Roundtable, Ram Charan, an award-winning professor from Harvard and Wharton, and a worldwide expert on business strategy, execution, corporate governance and building high-performance organizations, will share his insights from having sat on seven corporate boards and worked with the CEOs of some of the world’s most successful companies, including GE, Bank of America, Verizon, Coca-Cola, 3M.

Boards by nature must focus on the health of the company and the ROI each opportunity creates, which often means reverting to tried-and-proven core strategies. Underlying this mentality is resistance to pursuing new opportunities that appear too risky. Ram’s will teach us how to leverage a board as a powerful ally and how to influence them accordingly so you can ensure you are given the autonomy and resources to pursue non-core innovative options that might otherwise be overlooked. Together, you can co-create a transformative strategy and growth plan that will thrive through uncertainty and position your company to become a prime performer. Ram will also share teachings drawn from his 32 published books on how you can work together with your board on strategies like:

• Becoming a customer-centric company
• Relying less on pricing to improve the bottom line by exploring other techniques
• Transitioning from focusing less on earnings per share (EPS) and more on cash per share
• Tying these strategies together with flawless execution
• Learning to see your board as a partnership and working together to maximize profits and success for everyone can change your company on a fundamental level.

Ram Charan is a world-renowned business consultant, author and speaker who has spent the past 40 years working with many top companies, CEOs, and boards of our time. In his work with companies including Toyota, Bank of America, Key Bank, ICICI Bank, Aditya Birla Group, Novartis, Max Group, Yildiz Holdings, UST Global, Fast Retailing (Uniqlo), Humana, Matrix, Longfor and two of the four largest digital companies in China, he is known for cutting through the complexity of running a business in today’s fast-changing environment to uncover the core business problem. His real-world solutions, shared with millions through his books and articles in top business publications, have been praised for being practical, relevant and highly actionable — the kind of advice you can use Monday morning.

Ram has authored over 30 books since 1998 that have sold over 4 million copies in more than a dozen languages. Three of his books were Wall Street Journal bestsellers, including Execution, which he coauthored with former Honeywell CEO Larry Bossidy in 2002, which spent more than 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He also has written for publications including Harvard Business Review, Fortune, BusinessWeek, Time, Chief Executive and USA TODAY.