We had a great conversation with the Founder and CEO of The Demand Creation Institute, Sean Stormes.

Sean had the good fortune of leading a Continuous Quality Improvement initiative within a Fortune 500 company. This led him to the world’s authority Dr. William Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement. Deming was credited with revolutionizing Post World War II Japan’s manufacturing industry and making Japan one of the most dominant economies in the world. In 1951 the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers established The Deming Prize that recognizes organizations that have implemented systems that promote quality, and individuals who have made contributions to quality. It is one of the highest awards int the world and the longest running national quality award.

This formative experience led Sean to explore the world of variation, a symptom that eventually leads to defects. Once he began researching, he saw variation at every level of a company.

He saw variation in the articulation of purpose.

He saw variation in the articulation of value to the client.

He saw variation in the alignment of purpose, quality, and value throughout the company culture.

To add fuel to the fire, he also saw an epidemic of sameness. He could take any number of company websites in any market and see no substantial differences.

Finally, he saw that the measures of sales performance lacked the means to create a compounding effect, limiting the scale and impact of the company.

Sean’s passion for excellence in demand creation creates the context for all of this.

Enjoy this great conversation and then begin to question all the elements that add up to creating more from your go-to-market efforts.

I have seen it before. So have you. A disconnect:

• with your people

• with your stakeholders in your market

• with your prospects and customers

• with your board

And most important of all, you have compartments within you that are silos of excellence but are not integrated into a highly compelling story of you.

We invited Chris Hare, the Founder and Principal of The Storied Future, to our Podcast to discuss his journey in creating a story for himself, his company, and those he serves.

This portion of his quote next to his picture, above, grabbed me:

“I have the privilege of working with values-driven C-Suite leaders who have the audacity to believe they can bend the future to their will.”

We discuss what “values-driven” means as well as “bend the future to their will”, and why they are both key in creating a storied future personally and professionally.

Chris is highly transparent. It is because of the psychic pain he experienced that he was able to use this as a powerful transformational tool for others.

As the founder of The Sage Group, a value transformation firm, I know how powerful “story” is in building a successful company. This is more than marketing. This is an existential and strategic tool for those that dare to think they can change the world.

Enjoy this Great Conversation.

Ron Worman, The Sage Group

Markets are ecosystems. They are unique to geographies, economies, and weather (seasons of change).

Market participants later find they need to be represented as a single voice in representing their needs to the government or to coalesce around industry standards to uplift the quality of their industry.

For example, the American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS) was born in 1955. The original members were meeting to share information with each other and to adapt the security regulations that were coming out of the Department of Defense. Many had come to their security positions from the FBI, which was frequently asked after the war to perform security surveys of industrial sites.

Just as ASIS was launched to represent positional security authority within organizations, the Security Industry Association (SIA) founded in 1969 as a trade association representing global security solutions providers, including manufacturers, service providers, and integrators of electronic and physical security equipment.

Two associations representing two different groups within a common ecosystem.

Many more associations have been introduced within this market representing different interests and groups.

Interesting enough, no one as yet connected the vital information from each source into a single syndicated channel.

We talked with Michael Gips, JD, CPP, CSyP, CAE, the President of the recently reimagined Life Safety Alliance (LSA). He has served as both the Chief Security Officer and Chief Global Knowledge and Learning Officer for ASIS International, where he oversaw Learning, Content, Certification, Standards & Guidelines, Production, Enterprise Security Risk Management, and other departments. He developed the CSO Roundtable, an organization that includes hundreds of the most senior security executives at the biggest corporations around the world, as a membership group within ASIS. He also served as editor and publisher of Security Management, where he authored hundreds of articles. Mike is also a senior advisor for Cardinal Point Strategies, a senior advisor for the Network Contagion Research Institute, and a Partner in the Knowledgebase of Insider Threats. He also serves on the advisory boards of several organizations that provide technology and services in government security, executive protection, violence prevention, and emergency geolocation.

A highly networked, highly knowledgeable, and highly generous man.

As you listen to the conversation, you will see the hub of syndicated information he is attempting to aggregate, organize, and distribute as well as his vision for connecting the authors of the content with the moments that matter in the security market. If achieved this will be not only a content aggregator, but also a relationship generator which is the foundation of industry innovation and change. For those who join in this ground floor opportunity, it may represent a unique reciprocal opportunity to be at the table as a new syndication of relationship and content emerge.

Enjoy the conversation.