Rick Tate

Biography

Rick Tate has delivered keynote addresses, workshops and consulting projects for clients around the world challenging people`s mind-sets and developing new ways of thinking. Working through his California based international consulting firm, ThinkIT, Rick is an internationally recognized expert on service quality, leadership development and organizational excellence and is a founding faculty member of the Center for Innovative Leadership, and a faculty member for the Institute of Management Studies.

Rick has authored many books, articles and training programs including the best-seller, Leadership and the Customer Revolution, Legendary Service, Frontline Service, World Class Customer Service and The Service Monkey. His acclaimed training programs have been translated into over eleven languages and distributed all over the world.

Rick is a captivating and motivating speaker whose use of stories, examples, anecdotes and metaphors provides a unique learning experience for audiences. He speaks to literally thousands of people a year from groups of ten senior executives to thousands of front line employees.

His client list is extensive and reads like a "who`s who" of business. It includes such notable organizations as Disney, Coca Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Motorola, American Honda, Brinker, Xerox, IBM, Perrier, National Park Service, Norwest, Publix, Norstan, Manpower, Bank-One, Nortel and J.C. Penney.

Rick holds graduate degrees from the University of San Francisco and California American University and has served as a faculty member at many institutions of higher education.

Publications

Leadership and the Customer Revolution:
The Messy, Unpredictable, and Inescapably Human Challenge of Making the Rhetoric of Change a Reality

Re-engineering? How about TQM? Maybe if we organize in teams? Hire a consultant? Benchmarking? We`re all looking for ways to create a fast, flexible, adaptive, customer-focused organization. We`re talking about the changes we have to make. The problem is that we`ve simply been better at talking about change than we are at making the hard and often risky choice to change significantly. Leadership and the Customer Revolution levels an unflinching gaze at today`s rhetoric around change and at the actual reality we`ve created. Authors Heil, Parker, and Tate advocate taking revolutionary steps while recognizing the need to be pragmatic -- to serve today`s customers, quickly, efficiently, reliably, and impressively. They challenge us to re-examine our thinking, take on the system, delight customers, and help those we work with reach their potential. They invite us to become the architects of a very different kind of organization.

Drawing from the data gathered in scores of organizational audits and years of real-life, on-the-job experience, the authors tell:
~How to overcome the inevitable resistance (organizational white blood cells) that is produced in significant change efforts.
~How organizational DNA can facilitate decision making while cutting down on the need for rules.
~How to turn employee compliance into employee commitment.
~How to reduce morale-depleting and time - and money-wasting internal competition.
~How and why to make learning the foundation of all our improvement efforts.

Leadership and the Customer Revolution lays out 20 challenges that we must confront and broadens our understanding of the key issues we must address. It offers ideas to expedite the learning process, provides suggestions for experimentation, and helps us anticipate the effects of our actions. In this era of constant whitewater, we must make the choice to lead a revolution. We must work to transform our organizations to adapt to a constantly evolving marketplace. To do less is to put our futures and our organizations` futures at risk. As the challenges outlined by the authors suggest -- these are not times for the faint hearted. Caretaker leaders need not apply.

Titles

Challenges of the Customer Revolution

Leadership and the Customer Revolution

The Call For Leadership

Better, Faster, Different: Frontline Service in the 21st Century

Leading Change... "No Theory, No Learning"

The "No Spin Zone": Creating Customer-Centered Communications

Legendary Service: The 10 Fundamentals

Employee Retention

Rick customizes each and every program using tools such as a pre-program survey, client conference calls and extensive research. You`ll find Rick to be entertaining and knowledgeable about your particular company issues and your industry in general.