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“It is on your own self-knowledge and experience that the knowledge of everything else depends.”

The Cloud of Unknowing, a spiritual guidebook believed to have been written in the 14th century by an English monk

An administrative assistant with no experience booking professional speakers was asked by her manager to call me about my availability and fee to deliver an opening keynote for their upcoming staff conference. When I gave her my fee, she replied, “For one hour….Wow! What a job! And you don’t even have to have sex!” I didn’t touch that one.

The fact is her company would really be paying for 30 years of study, experience, and practice summarized into one concentrated hour tailored to their needs. After the engagement, the admin assistant had a much better appreciation for the value I delivered to the audience in shifting perspectives on the roles everyone needs to play in leading at the speed of change. I certainly do feel very privileged to be well paid for my speaking, writing, consulting, facilitating, and training work.

I first experienced the transformational power of the personal growth and leadership principles that have since shaped my life and career – and form the key themes of this book – in a straight-commission sales job at Culligan Water Conditioning. I was 18. Applying these principles led to a fairly meteoric rise into supervisory, coaching, and training roles.

After participating in and helping to teach Dale Carnegie Training courses, I briefly joined that company to sell training and help deliver their public speaking, sales, and management courses. That was in 1977. Later that year – right after Heather and I were married – Culligan re-hired me as a sales trainer and internal consultant. During the next few years, I coached salespeople and owner/dealers using these principles and approaches. Sales rose dramatically. At age 24, I was promoted to General Manager of Culligan Canada’s largest branch in Edmonton, Alberta. Again, these principles had a dramatic impact on the staff I was leading. During my 18 months in that position we increased revenues 35 percent.

In 1981, I left Culligan to co-lead The Achieve Group, a management training and consulting company started in Edmonton by Art McNeil. Shortly after that, Heather and I moved back to Southern Ontario and worked together to build Achieve’s Client base (we’ve always capitalized the most important people to our business) and start our family. Working with California-based training designer Zenger Miller throughout the 1980s, I hired and trained dozens of Achieve account executives, trainers, consultants, and support staff. We not only sold programs and services teaching these personal, team, and organization effectiveness principles; we built our own company around them. By 1990, The Achieve Group had become Canada’s largest training and consulting company.

In 1991, Achieve was purchased by Times Mirror and merged with Zenger Miller, Learning International, and Kaset to form AchieveGlobal. For the next few years, I was an executive team facilitator and coach traveling extensively across Canada and the U.S. I delivered keynote presentations and facilitated dozens of senior management team retreats and coaching sessions. Some of our Clients hired us because my new book, Firing on All Cylinders: The Service/Quality System for High-Powered Corporate Performance, was a top seller and caught the Total Quality Management wave (later this evolved to Lean Six Sigma techniques). The unsuccessful ones were jumping on a fad bandwagon and seeing limited results from their limited efforts. But most of our Clients diligently applied the team and organization principles and saw dramatic performance results –as well as greater personal success.

In 1994, Heather and I founded The CLEMMER Group. Building upon my third book, Pathways to Performance: A Guide to Transforming Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization, I and a few associates started with a small number of customized workshops, keynote presentations, management retreats, consulting, coaching, and training programs. Our experiences and offerings have expanded exponentially with new books and related application guides and training materials.

My next book, Growing the Distance: Timeless Principles for Personal, Career, and Family Success, became one of my most popular because of its broader application, unique “browser’s digest” format, and inspirational messages. With that book, I developed our Timeless Leadership Principles “Leadership Wheel” model that also formed the central structure of its companion book, The Leader’s Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success. This model for leading ourselves and others became a central structure of The CLEMMER Group’s leadership development workshops and training materials.

For my next book, I studied the craft of storytelling through novels. Moose on the Table: A Novel Approach to Communications @ Work was an “edutaining case study,” or work of fiction focused on Pete Leonard, a struggling manager. Pete’s story brought to life the core personal growth, leadership development, and organizational effectiveness principles detailed in my previous books.

You can get more background on my books, materials, workshops, and The CLEMMER Group consulting and training services, view dozens of video clips of me presenting many of these principles, and read through over 300 articles, on our web site at www.JimClemmer.com.

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