REX Succession Roundtables serve businesses owners who are committed to developing a second-generation leader and effectively implementing the transfer of leadership. The first generation is typically the founder of the business, while the second generation may be a family member or an unrelated executive. Although the mechanics of succession are fairly straightforward, the process involves significant emotional content that often hinders succession or makes it unnecessarily frustrating and damaging to the business. Bringing pairs of leaders together in a Succession Roundtable enables the participants to see the common elements in the succession process across several different businesses. Each pair has successfully addressed some of the steps in succession. Their experience and encouragement are invaluable to others. Cross matching succession pairs by putting the founder of company A with the successor from company B enables a level of dialogue leading each to better understand their own succession partner. A typical Succession Roundtable may have four to eight succession partners and be jointly chaired by a business expert and a business psychologist. This roundtable meets two to three times a year. REX M.O.A.B. (My Own Advisory Board) provides an effective and very low cost program for owners of small businesses. M.O.A.B. brings owners of small business in the same industry together, and forms them into advisory boards that meet regularly to advise and support one another. REX provides training and on going support tools to these informal boards. M.O.A.B. is frequently set up through an industry association. M.O.A.B. provides very high value at extraordinarily dollar low costs. REX Micro Conferences for break through strategic thinking are designed for industries where REX Roundtables are active. Each Micro Conference focuses on a well-defined aspect of the industry. These are often emerging opportunities or threats that the industry has not fully or successfullyaddressed. Participants are carefully selected and limited in number. REX What's Next? For executives exploring the next stage of their life. This roundtable operates at the deepest levels of personal growth and transformation. It explores achievement, satisfaction, meaning and legacy in work, family, marriage, community and personal life. Your emotional and spiritual life is a part of this process. Strengths are identified and articulated, on going and emerging passions clarified, and opportunities explored. The extended nature of this year long process enables unusual depth as well as extraordinary support in the implementation process. Six to eight sessions are held during the year depending on the members’ schedules. The roundtable is limited to twelve participants. Full time attendance is essential. This is neither a therapeutic process, nor traditional retirement planning. Rather, this is a developmental adventure to help you clarify what’s next and bring it to reality. Readings are provided to provoke and inspire. What’s Next? is designed to give you a new life with extraordinary rewards. Each session will include at least one overnight. REX Getting Better Teams operate inside a single organization to complement the operational management team. The leadership of any organization is faced with the challenge of balancing two fundamental tasks: doing the job and getting better at doing that job. Balancing these two tasks is a challenge because they are incompatible. That is, "getting better" is in conflict with the "doing" or "getting by" agenda. Making improvements usually requires that we stop doing something long enough to figure out how to do it better. Getting better can be very difficult for at least four reasons: no time, no thought (on where to head), no help (from your team), no methods (to help you decide where to start and how to do it), and no discipline (to stick with it). A purely individual effort to change an organization rarely has the momentum to succeed—even when it comes from the top, and even when consultants have delineated a comprehensive theory and practice such as total quality management or reengineering. For more on how to get better see chapter 12 in Will Phillips book Responsible Managers Get Results. Naturally, we tend to use the normal hierarchical organization to manage and operate improvement activities. Experience reveals, however, that trying to use the normal structure for "getting better" efforts does not generally produce the desired results. The normal or operational structure is designed for the world of "doing." When we know what to do and we just need to get it done, the operational structure works very well. Getting better requires the organization to enter new territory by challenging old assumptions and creating new alternatives. The urgency, the results orientation, and the bureaucracy inherent in operational structures all tend to distract people from the new territory of improvement. Building and sustaining lasting improvement programs require that we separate the "getting better" activities from the "doing" or "getting by" activities and manage the improvement effort with a totally different set of structures, processes and procedures. This is the Getting Better Team. REX has produced a comprehensive manual on structuring and operating internal roundtables as Getting Better Teams. Typically, roundtable chairs help CEO members of a REX set up and operate a Getting Better Team. REX has also designed a three-day workshop to train members of an internal Getting Better Team. This workshop has been presented over ninety-five times. A Getting Better Team powerfully links the benefits of a CEO participating in an Executive Roundtable to the organization. See Transferring Roundtable Learning to Organizational Learning. REX Multiple Location Roundtables are set up in businesses with multiple locations where each location uses the same business model, such as a chain of retail stores, a health club with dozens of locations or a the local offices of a national brokerage firm. The RT consists of up to twenty location managers. Having the same business model enables performance comparisons to be made across key indicators. This database becomes the stimulus for the roundtable's agenda. How can each location learn from the others in order to improve performance? How can each location leader most effectively pursue personal and professional development? The RT does not include members from corporate headquarters, district or regional managers. These folks visit the RT now and then to provide their perspective and to hear from the local leaders. The chair mediates this connection. The power of this form of RT is the quality of the interaction and engagement between the location leaders. With the absence of superiors and the presence of a skilled chair the level of truth rises dramatically. Members speak more fully and openly. They challenge one another and hold their peers accountable in new and effective ways. A few years of a Multiple Location Roundtable can enable a chain to gain significant insight in how to manage multiple locations toward higher performance. REX User Group Roundtables are designed to provide a win-win result for a vendor of a product or service and their users. REX finds that user groups that are set up and facilitated by the vendor may not achieve their potential for improving the user's use and improving the vendors product/service and growing their sales. This occurs for several reasons. Vendors use user groups to sell more than listen; vendors are too quick to find the user at fault; vendors fail to help users articulate unmet and un discovered needs; vendors have too much ego in the group to learn as deeply as possible; vendors are more skilled at design than implementation and vendors may fail to capture the user to user learning. These are harsh critiques, but they based on actual experience. For a taste of reality we can help you get a users' assessment of how well you are doing with your users on the above items and a few more not listed. REX designs user groups for vendors that truly want to learn from their users. We chair these are user/focus groups with a strong results orientation. We want both users and the vendor to quickly achieve bottom line results from a high level, on going collaborative partnership between vendor and users.