Today, more than at any time in modern business history, a high-performance workplace culture is critical to maximizing the potential of any enterprise. Businesses today are facing increasing foreign competition, customer and supplier consolidation, reverse auctioning and many other phenomenal trends that make it difficult to compete effectively, let alone reach the true potential leaders envision for their organizations.

In spite of all of the challenges an attendee's organization faces today, they know as well as I do that some organizations within the industry will not only survive, but will excel beyond all expectations. I can almost assure attendees that those organizations will be characterized by their outstanding workplace cultures.

Great organizational cultures are characterized by three attributes: they consistently produce outstanding results at every level of the enterprise; they attract, motivate and retain top talent; and they successfully adapt to changing conditions.

These cultures are most often created by people who understand their responsibilities as workplace cultural leaders, and are making conscious, knowledgeable decisions that improve their organizations every single day. These decisions are made based on an understanding of the factors that impact workplace culture in a significant way.

Of those factors, there are six discernable elements of organizational culture that must be in place if an organization is to live up to its potential:

• Core Values
• Customer/Product Relationship
• Direction
• Structure (People and Processes)
• Measurements
• Rewards

In more than 30 years of leadership in a couple of the most outstanding workplace cultures in modern times, I have had the opportunity to learn a lot about the power of workplace culture. Several of these situations have been at the heart of businesses like the attendees'. In my session, I will look at organizational culture not as a soft, hypothetical leadership concept, but as the very heart of building organizations that live up to a company's true potential.

I invite attendees to join me in discussing the power of these critical cultural elements within their organization and the necessity for outstanding cultural leadership, not only at the top of the organization, but at every level of leadership. They will come to realize that they will never maximize the potential of their organization until every leader, at every level, is an outstanding cultural leader within his or her own "subculture."

In the session, attendees also will have the opportunity to assess their own organization's strengths and weaknesses as they relate to those six critical elements of organizational culture.