Windward Leadership Services

The key to your organization's competitive advantage is its culture. The key to your organization's culture is your leadership.

We all know that productivity is defined as output divided by input.  In business we measure this as revenue divided by expenses. Unfortunately, too many leaders, found at all organizational levels, are "denominator managers".  They have only one play in their playbook: "cut costs"; their organization's problems are over managed and their people are under led.  Meanwhile, numerator leaders-leaders who know how to create value-seem to be an endangered species.

Yet, this is a great time to be leading because it is a time of great challenge and rapid change--we are in the midst of an amazing transition at the macro level. In the past, doing well and doing good were mutually exclusive. This does not have to be how we do business today. To achieve durable success, today, we conduct business with long lasting, interdependent relationships--relationships with customers, relationships with employees, relationships with stockholders, relationships with suppliers, and relationships with the community. The macro shift that is going on in the world today is that those things that lead to material well being, and those things that lead to virtuous well being are now converging. These things are now coming together, whereas throughout the previous history of mankind they were going apart.

Today what leads to competitive advantage is not property, capital, or technology. In today's global market these things can now flow to the next person as easily as they can flow to you, and in an Internet connected world they do so at the speed of light. But what is not fluid, what transitions very slowly, is human competence and culture. It is an organization's culture that enables it to create and sustain competitive advantage.

Windward Leadership helps you put on the nuts and bolts in that little corner of the world that you have the good fortune to lead.  Toward this end, we not only offer a number of consulting products and services, but have begun to bulid this site as a resource center for leadership and leading organizational change.

Accordingly, all of our services are designed to help leaders, leadership teams, and their organizations gain and sustain competitive advantage.  The Windward Process: Leading, for a Change, is a unique kind of engagement where we will work with you and your leadership team to teach you the Windward process and to coach you in its implementation.  We are also available for keynote speaking.  In addition, we have a unique workshop, Managing Supply v. Demand, which is designed specifically for internal service organizations, like Information Technology, where we teach a process to align your project priorities with your company's strategies, and keep them aligned.  Finally, we also offer traditional leadership coaching and management consulting. 

Cultivating the leadership that is necessary to gain and sustain competitive advantage is the mission of Windward Leadership, and it is the purpose of Jim Ruprecht's book, Windward Leadership: Taking Your Organization into the Prevailing Winds and Political Seas.