John Rossman

THINKING IN OUTCOMES: Leadership for FAST Innovation & Succeeding at Big Bets

BIG BETS happen at all levels in a company – the enterprise, division, product, program, and team. BIG BETS are the initiatives and plans we think will deliver lasting impact, but there is significant risk as these are complex strategies and plans. They are a BIG BET. BIG BETS goes by many names, like digital transformations, new business models, innovation programs, and strategic initiatives. Over 80% of all BIG BETS fail to deliver on time, on a budget, or deliver the expected business impact. Some seem to never end. This leaves leadership wary of trying more bets and risk being left behind in a rapidly changing industry. Based on research and 35 years of delivering BIG BETS to Fortune 100 companies, John Rossman gives you a playbook for Thinking in Outcomes to succeed at your BIG BETS. Based on his forthcoming book Thinking in Outcomes.

BIG BET LEADERSHIP for Generative AI: Your Playbook for Disruptive Technologies

Discover how to lead a reengineering of your business by harnessing the power of ChatGPT, generative AI and other disruptive technologies. This keynote presents a strategic leadership playbook designed to guide leaders through the process of digital transformation and business reinvention, positioning their organization for long-term success. The power and impact of ChatGPT, generative AI, computer vision, the internet of things and other disruptive technologies is awesome, and a bit scary. How do leaders create the thinking, environment, and management structures to understand, create business value, and lead their teams to embrace the technology and the changes that are coming?

Leadership & Culture for Growth & Innovation - The Amazon Way

Leadership is a skill. Culture is the default standard defining how we work together. So, how can you build on your leadership and culture to drive systematic growth & innovation? Based on the best-selling The Amazon Way: Amazon’s Leadership Principles, Rossman outlines a set of strategies and tactics, giving a playbook for any industry or situation to make small changes resulting in significant impact. Customer centricity, metrics and operational excellence, a system for innovation, Amazon’s “working backwards” methodology, disagree but commit, and deliver hard results are just some of the leadership playbook with habits to reinforce and create change.

Think Like Amazon...What's the Future of Your Industry?

Is your company ready to create the future of your company and industry? Leaders who want to drive innovation must ask this while challenging conventional thinking if they want to have a future in their industry. But what are the right questions to ask to create that future? How do we develop our strategy? How can we anticipate industry disruption, and how we adapt? Former Amazon Executive John Rossman was a key leader in launching and scaling the third-party platform which today accounts for over 50% of Amazon’s business, leading to fundamental disruption to the retail industry. By leveraging many of the ideas from Think Like Amazon, Rossman provides principles and strategies which drove Amazon and can drive your industry’s future. He will challenge your team and provide them with strategies, tools, and questions to help you begin creating your company’s future.

NEVER WASTE A GOOD CRISIS: The Winning Playbook for Market Volatility

Your supply prices and lead times are rising, your employee wages are increasing, transportation is getting more expensive, and critical components (like chips) might be in short supply. Your COGS and your P&L are a mess. Your world and business might feel like it’s in crisis. This is a leadership choice -- waste time worrying about what’s coming or plan to survive and thrive in the volatile market? John delivers an engaging story explaining how challenging traditional thinking and management science can help you maximize the value of a good crisis and guide you to innovate and strengthen your business. Volatile markets and uncertainty lead most organizations to cut, run and stick their head in the sand until the storm passes. You'll learn how it is the ideal time to go on offense by focusing on rapid innovation and finding immediate ROI opportunities to improve operational effectiveness. Audience members leave with practical theory, examples, tools, and techniques to help them build better strategies, plans, and solutions so they never waste a good crisis.

Reinventing Healthcare & Insurance Through Patient Centricity, Innovation & Leadership ~The Amazon Way

The US healthcare industry is almost 20% of GDP, but what might the future of healthcare become? What can we predict out of Amazon’s healthcare strategy? And how can we adapt to change while improving patient outcomes, the employee experience, and growing your business? The answer is leadership built for the challenge of driving excellence and simultaneously delivering innovation. John delivers a healthcare leadership playbook built to deliver a clear strategy, effectively drive change, and become a world-class operator while being a systematic innovator. Your healthcare leadership team will be inspired to become a more strategic thinker with tools to help your plan for the future in healthcare.

"John is perhaps one of the foremost experts on Amazon and corporate cultures that focus on innovation. His recent book on the Amazon Way is a testament to the core insights John has been able to surface. Recently, John was invited to do a forum at Xerox PARC. We were not only oversubscribed for the forum, but the audience itself gave John and his presentation the highest rank of all the seminars this past year. I highly recommend John as a speaker to all audiences interested in corporate innovation, company cultures, and the impact of emerging technology on new business models.”

- | Xerox

"It was a privilege to have John Rossman speak at our March 25th, 2015, Georgia Technology Summit. Our Summit is one of the largest tech events in the SE, with over 1,300 attendees participating. This year's Summit theme was "Disruptive Innovation - The Power to Inspire". John's remarks were right on target. Combining key points in his Book, the Amazon Way, with his broader knowledge base, made for a quality presentation. One participant sent me an unsolicited note comparing John's presentation to a high-level Ted Talk. I would recommend John for speaking opportunities for an event of any size when the topic revolves around innovation and/or disruption. He was also a pleasure to work with, which is a sometimes overlooked aspect when it comes to speaker selection, yet of critical importance."

- | TAG - Technology Association of Georgia

"We needed an expert to speak at our corporate leadership event—someone who was able to speak at length on adopting different corporate cultures and looking at business from a different perspective than our own. While people may not think of Amazon and AAA Washington as having much in common, finding ways to make a business more efficient and keeping the customer in focus is a basis for all organizations. His personal history at Amazon gave us a unique view of an incredibly successful company and what it takes to innovate, lead, and sometimes disrupt the status quo."

- | AAA

"In planning our 2015 product organization kickoff, we looked for a speaker who could both inspire and offer practical insights on execution. We were lucky to have John Rossman present to the team. John introduced us to the key leadership principles he observed during his time at Amazon, which are also described in his excellent (and accessible) book, The Amazon Way."

- | CIPP