Speakers Corner

At the Breken Group, our reputation has been built on 10 years of teaching, training and facilitating (previously under the brand name of Entreco). All our work is customized to meet the exact needs of our clients. Whether its a two hour talk, a full day workshop or a six month facilitation project, we always begin with an understanding of why people in an organization are doing what they're doing, and where they want to get to. Then we design and plan an approach that will take us there.

Walk past one of our workshops or team meetings and you'll hear laughter. Adults learn best when they are engaged, participating and enjoying themselves. And they also look at change more positively. At Breken, we're serious about our fun. Our material is designed to get people involved, because involvement pays off. Doing the up front work with our clients gives us the confidence to deliver what they want to achieve.

A partial listing of our "curriculum" follows although much of the work that we do is highly customized to specific industry and client needs.

Trend Convergence - Strategies for Future Success
Helping organizations find future direction and build consensus on strategic opportunities, challenges and action responses

Themes

• Trend analysis combines insights on breakthroughs in technology, economics, demographics, social/cultural norms and organizational strategy to create new models of working that challenge, inspire and create

• Future opportunities and challenges are examined specific to the client's organization

• Help in coping with change focuses on the identification of action plans to enhance the positive elements of change and to manage the attendant difficulties and stresses

• Trend convergence provides insight into innovative potential future directions and to potential new product and service offerings

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Four-Dimension Planning - Making Marketing Strategies Sing
Providing organizations with a four-stage model to better develop successful sales and marketing strategies for future success.

Themes

• Customer-focused thinking is enhanced by exploratory exercises that may include designing a love boat cruise or predicting cat owner attitudes towards their pet. Using numerous examples, participants learn a four-stage model to better develop marketplace positioning and organizational focus

• What business are you in? At the beginning of a session, participants are asked to write down what business they are in on one sentence; by the end of the session, most have changed their original viewpoint

• Customer Behavior includes insight into new-age customer buying patterns & habits along with the sales strategies that work to capture them

• Enhancing Customer Satisfaction demonstrates how policy and culture influence customer service and selling strategies

• Defining targets helps participants build consensus on the optimal marketing and selling strategies for future success

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Learning a Living - Individual & Organizational Improvement
Offering the best in leadership and organizational improvement strategies.

Themes

• Work Design is a process of involving frontline employees to rethink and redesign the way work is organized and structured in order to improve effectiveness and provide a more satisfying workplace. Based on best practice cases, process improvement strategies and implementation experiences are showcased for organizational improvement

• Organizational culture and the conditions which produce the best results involve an examination of the latest methods and ways to identify workplace culture and initiate positive cultural change, creating high-performance learning organizations

• Avoiding Bad Vibes highlights avoiding the traps that lead to "the dark night of the innovator"

• Leadership skills involve identifying the key skills managers require for future success, including the ten modules of Leadership Skills For the Future series.

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Learning a Living
Personal Job Security and Careers of the Future
Features trends impacting the world of work and insights into how to create personal job security in this time of change.

Themes

• The new economy is examined with a focus on the major shifts in how the rules of work have changed. Learn about the changes that pertain to the world of work and the essential skills and attitudes for future success

• Hot Careers are highlighted based on trend analysis and job statistics

• Finding Your Future includes developing ways of connecting skills and interests to future career opportunities

• The Innovative Organization examines the readiness for change, the need to align vision and culture to strategy, and the opportunities and challenges involved in the process of designing work to create future success

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Innovative Strategies for Municipalities
Examining best practices in municipal visioning, economic development plans, regional promotion and e-municipality strategies to better serve constituents

Themes

• Strategic Partnerships are the future provides lead-edge knowledge for the creation of regional Centres of Excellence. Creating business clusters involves private and public partnerships to promote strategy, commercialize ideas and promote economic development. Learn from examples around the world and discover best practices in the development and promotion of Regional Clusters.

• Beyond marketing utilizes a four-dimension marketing planning process to create suitable regional positioning and sales strategies, incorporating strengths & weaknesses and reaching a consensus on action plans to enhance economic development

• Trend Analysis and Trend Convergence identifies best practices in defining future opportunities and threats along with a method for developing appropriate action plans

• E-municipality solutions are quickly moving to the Web as a means of promoting businesses and helping local communities showcase their community's strengths to the rest of the world. Current trends in e-municipalities are highlighted, including improved communication among stakeholders, enhanced regional promotion, local and external buy/sell potential, local data collection and provision of constituent services

• E-municipality business directory software overview as a Web-based best practice for the attraction and retention of new businesses in local communities

• Visioning Exercises for municipalities are tailored to the challenges of the local community

• Highlights provided of the 2001 EDCO (Economic Development Council of Ontario) Strategic Planning sessions

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True Colours
Getting to the heart of communication in an interactive,
informative and fun workshop

Themes

• Develop team communication in an entertaining and appealing way, given that communication is one of the primary sources of frustration and conflict in organizations

• Learn about your own and others unique strengths and preferences, by identifying those unique characteristics that you are good at, what frustrates you and how to work best with others

• Four personality types are reviewed, how people differ from one another and how best to respond in everyday situations

• Understand how to improve communication strategies within your organization

• Discover your true colours!

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