The “Capstone” portion for our 2019 class of Strategic Thinking Initiative participants got started this week with a week sequestered outside the office.
The STI project is designed to give 15 leaders in the company a period of dedicated study and work focused on a couple of projects of particular importance to the company.
That’s the capstone for the teams, which have been spending the past few months in educational workshops with Roseanna DeMaria, a former professor at New York University who has worked with National Life for several years now.
Roseanna’s classes have prepared the STI participants for the time away from their “day jobs,” which started in earnest on Monday.
They spent time defining their common purpose, team norms, and capstone problems.
Though the process has led to some arm wrestling, intellectual and otherwise, it has been a great opportunity to start the capstone journey strong.
“We’re especially grateful to our teammates who are filling in while we’re on this journey,” said Kara Leclerc, “They make it possible. We’ll work to make it worth their effort.”
The participants have been broken into two groups, one focused on Profitability: Making the Invisible Visible.
This capstone is “focused on making the invisible parts of profitability visible, with a deep dive into our buying and selling customer’s mindset and behaviors, predicting the less visible trends of tomorrow while applying the knowledge of profits from today. This is the next stage of our maturity as an organization, as we continue to grow at a pace faster than the industry, bringing Peace of Mind to everyone we touch.”
This team is made up of: Joe Chen, Neville Clemens, Desiree Day, Darryl Garland, Kara Leclerc, Lou Martinez, Louis Puglisi, and Rob Lewton.
The other capstone is focused on Value of a Relationship. It’s goal is to “establish a value for our relationships to enable better value-based business decisions.”
And this team is made up of J.F. Breton, Mike Carter, Justin Daniels, Bob Earle, Carey Earle, Meghan Meyer and Jeff Wood.
