“Mitch Ditkoff's Awake at the Wheel keynote presentation was both entertaining and informative. Over 1,030 Merck employees attended and rated the session a 4.8 out of 5.0. In just two hours, Mitch not only got participants "out of the cave" and generating a wide range of innovative and powerful ideas, he also helped us understand what it takes to establish a sustainable culture of innovation within our organization.”
Jim Aubele, Associate Director of Organizational Learning, Merck

The Power of Two
The Manager’s Guide to Sparking Innovation
In today's downsized, delayered, re-engineered corporation, the role of the manager is radically changing. Command and control are rapidly giving way to self-managed teams. Middle men (or middle women) are just about as valued these days as middle age, which is just one of the reasons why middle managers are fast becoming — like the spotted owl — an endangered species. Clearly, managers need to re-invent themselves if they expect to survive in today's marketplace. They need to learn new skills, new tools and new approaches.

What kind of skills, tools and approaches? The kind that will leverage them and their companies to the fullest. And that, in today's knowledge-based economy, has less to do with mergers and acquisitions than it does with the human mind itself — the problem solving, solution finding, idea generating, product inventing, process improving capacity of people to meet and exceed their pressing business challenges.

Simply put, managers must become coaches if they expect to make the cut. But not just any kind of coach. Innovation coaches – change agents capable of helping others get out of the box and achieve extraordinary results. The days of hired hands are over. Now, it's hired minds — or shall we say highered minds. And it's the manager of the future's role to find new and better ways of helping those minds turn their top of the line ideas into bottom line realities.

Enter The Power of Two — a wake up call for managers who know they need to do something different, but don't know what – or how. This exciting, interactive keynote provides not only inspiration, but practical tools and techniques to help managers translate theory into action — new behaviors they can apply on the job to help their direct reports become powerful agents of change.

Free the Genie!
55 Ways to Get Out of the Box
During the past decade, billions of dollars have been spent on re-engineering efforts by well-meaning corporations intent on dramatically improving bottom-line performance and gaining the edge they need to succeed in today's radically changing marketplace. And yet, curiously, industry watchers are increasingly reporting that the results of most re-engineering interventions have been seriously disappointing.

Why? One clue lies in the word itself. Look at it for a moment. Do you see what the root of the word is? "Engine" (the machine that converts energy into motion). Now, take a look at the word "engine." Do you see it's root? "Gine" — a word that comes from the Latin "ingenum" — the same root from which the words "genius," "ingenuity," and "genie" originate. Simply put, at the core of re-engineering is the engine... and at the core of the engine is the genie... or genius — a long neglected resource in most organizations.

How evident is genius in your company? How healthy? How capable is your workforce of originating breakthrough solutions to your company's pressing business challenges? What if you could free this genie? What if you could release the individual and collective brainpower of your organization? Imagine the new products and services that might be invented... processes improved. Customers delighted. Costs reduced. Morale boosted...

Mitch Ditkoff’s Free the Genie keynote is a powerful way to catalyze a renaissance of powerful, new ideas in your organization. Audiences address real-time business challenges and make real-time commitments to doing something different in order to close the gap between the theory of innovation and the practice.

Assume Nothing!
Overcoming the #1 Obstacle to Innovation
There are tons reasons why an individual or company does not innovate. But the biggest of them all is the tendency each one of us has to be ruled by limiting assumptions — those false beliefs and other half-baked conclusions that have absolutely nothing to do with reality. Old paradigms. Outdated mental models. And useless habits of thinking.

During the past 25 years, Mitch Ditkoff has worked closely with thousands of people all over the world to help them identify and go beyond their limiting assumptions. Why? Because their very survival depends on it. Because somewhere, one of their competitors is inventing a new product, service or process that is not ruled by the same assumption. It's what FedEx was able to do by putting together a nationwide package delivery system. It's what Japanese carmakers did to Detroit. And it's how the inventors of the ATM machine revolutionized retail banking when they realized that customers did not need to go through a teller to make a transaction.

Assume Nothing! is an engaging, interactive keynote that enables every member of your audience to identify his or her biggest limiting assumption and use it as a catalyst to conceive new ways of going beyond the status quo. Below is a sampling of the kind of assumptions that are identified and transformed in this keynote: