Ram Charan is a highly sought after business advisor and speaker famous among senior executives for his uncanny ability to solve their toughest business problems. For more than thirty-five years, Dr. Charan has worked behind the scenes with top executives at some of the world's most successful companies, including GE, Verizon, Novartis, Dupont, Thomson Corporation, Honeywell, KLM, Bank of America and MeadWestvaco. He has shared his insights with many others through teaching and writing.

Dr. Charan's introduction to business came early while working in the family shoe shop in the small Indian town where he was raised. He earned an engineering degree in India and soon after took a job in Australia and then in Hawaii. When his talent for business was discovered, Dr. Charan was encouraged to pursue it. He earned MBA and doctorate degrees from Harvard Business School, where he graduated with high distinction and was a Baker Scholar. After receiving his doctorate degree, he served on the Harvard Business School faculty.

Dr. Charan is well known for providing advice that is down to earth and relevant and that takes into account the real-world complexities of business. Among his recommendations for achieving profitable growth, for example, are to search for "singles and doubles" as well as home runs and to develop what he calls a "growth budget" to instill discipline on growth initiatives. Identified by Fortune as the leading expert in corporate governance, Dr. Charan is helping boards go beyond the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley and the New York Stock Exchange by providing practical ways to improve their group dynamics. Boards, CEOs and senior-most human resource executives often seek his advice on talent planning and key hires.

Many people have come to know Dr. Charan through in-house executive education programs. His energetic, interactive teaching style has won him several awards. He won the Bell Ringer award at GE's famous Crotonville Institute and best teacher award at Northwestern. He was among BusinessWeek's top ten resources for in-house executive development programs.

Over the past decade, Dr. Charan has captured his business insights in numerous books and articles. In the past five years, Dr. Charan's books have sold more than 2 million copies. In his newest book, published in April 2009, Owning Up: The 14 Questions Every Board Member Needs to Ask, Ram Charan answers burning questions on the minds of directors and business leaders and confronts the need for some boards to refresh their composition and for others to rebalance their board dynamics. His other books include Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation the bestseller Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done and Confronting Reality, both co-authored with Larry Bossidy; What the CEO Wants You to Know, Boards at Work, Every Business Is a Growth Business, Profitable Growth and Boards That Deliver.

A frequent contributor to Fortune, Dr. Charan has written two cover stories, "Why CEOs Fail" and "Why Companies Fail." His articles have appeared in the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Director's Monthly, and Strategy and Business. Dr. Charan has served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Corporate Governance and was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. He is on the board of Austin Industries and Tyco Electronics.

• Managing in the Downturn - Tools to Use - Based on Ram Charan's book, Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules of Getting Things Done in Difficult Times, this presentation discusses how preparing a company to survive a prolonged period of slow growth or even contraction is one of the most difficult tasks that will ever confront management. Leaders must recognize the new reality confronting their companies and take the necessary steps to shore up the company and weather the storm. Ram Charan will show you the tools leaders and managers need to implement to prepare for and steer through these tough economic times and also how to seize the opportunities that invariably arise out of difficult environments.
  
  
• The Game Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation - Charan discusses how to increase and sustain organic revenue and profit growth whether you're running an entire company or in your first management job. In a world of unprecedented change, competitiveness and commoditization, innovation is the best way to win. Innovation is not a separate, discrete activity but the job of anyone in a leadership position.
  
  
• Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done - For many leaders, creating a strategy is the easy part. Making it happen is the bigger challenge. Why is flawless execution so hard to achieve? Because few leaders understand what it requires. This presentation shows how to get the job done and deliver results...whether you're running an entire company or in your first management job. Ram explores what "execution" really means, and how it brings together the critical elements of any organization-its people, strategies, and operations. Execution takes personal discipline, and more important, a systematic approach to synchronizing the moving parts of the organization. Based on the best selling and highly praised book Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done this is practical, insightful, leading-edge business thinking for organizations that want to do things differently.
  
  
• Know-how: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don't - Ram Charan has worked with top management teams around the world-learning in the most visceral way the underlying reasons why leaders succeed and fail. In this presentation, he shares his new grand theory of leadership. All too often we mistake the appearance of leadership for the real deal. Without a doubt, intelligence, vision, and the ability to communicate are important. But something big is missing: the know-how of running a business-the capacity to take it in the right direction, do the right things, deliver results, and leave the people and the business better off than they were before. By Showing audiences how the eight know-hows link to, interact with, and reinforce personal and psychological traits, Ram Charan provides a fascinating portrait of successful leaders of the twenty-first century-one that every company will benefit from hearing about.
  
  
• Growth - Especially in a slow economy, growth can seem impossible to achieve. But growth opportunities almost always exist. What is needed is a disciplined approach to identify, pursue, and fund them. Based on the Ram's two books on growth, Every Business Is a Growth Business and Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business: 9 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning, this presentation will stimulate new ideas and explore new terrain in the quest to find new markets, new customers, and new business opportunities.
  
  
• Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right - The fundamentals of how a business makes money are being rapidly and permanently altered by sweeping structural changes. With his extraordinary depth and breadth of experience, Ram Charan is the ideal guide for everyone -entrepreneur, mid-level manager, or CEO-about what is to be done so you can get things right in this challenging, radically changed world. He starts by showing you how to understand the most fundamental element of any business: whether you can realistically make the money you hope to in the game you're playing. He then shows how to use the business model to develop a robust, reality-based process for thinking about the specifics of your business in a holistic way. He shows how to tie together the financial targets you must meet, the external realities you face, and internal activities such as strategy development, operating tactics, and selection and development of people.