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John Canfield      

Business Executive, Innovation Expert, Strategic Consultant

John Canfield is an experienced business executive and coach known for implementing effective planning, problem-solving, creativity, and innovation processes across various teams, organizations, industries, and cultures. His expertise particularly shines in fostering environments of accelerated growth and ambition, making him a valuable asset in today's dynamic corporate landscape.

Canfield has over thirty years of experience speaking to diverse audiences, ranging from large conventions to executive boardrooms. He has delivered speeches to more than one thousand audiences worldwide. His engaging presentations are tailored to inspire leadership and manage teams effectively during times of change, resonating well with businesses aiming to transform mindsets and navigate transitions smoothly.

His clients include prominent names such as AT&T, Citibank, Deloitte & Touche, First USA, General Motors, Merck, and Underwriters Lab, along with thousands of participants from his seminars and keynote speeches presented across North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Canfield's approach involves a mix of purposeful speaking and humor, enabling him to connect with his audience, adjust the mood, raise the energy level, and leave a lasting impact with a memorable closing story.

Canfield also serves as an instructor and consultant for various institutions including Advanced Practical Thinking Training, The American Management Association, and The Canadian Management Center. He is involved with the American Supplier Institute, The Forum Corporation, Leadership Strategies, and Lean Enterprise Institute, among others, enhancing his reputation as a leader in creative and strategic thinking.

His "Good Thinking Series," a four-part publication available on Amazon, offers practical strategies and tools to bolster organizational performance by enhancing effective thinking among leaders and employees. The series covers crucial topics such as collaboration skills, problem-solving, creative thinking, strategic planning, and scenario planning.

Canfield holds a B.S. in Mechanical & Industrial Engineering from the University of Minnesota and a B.A. in Political Science and Psychology from Williams College. His prior roles include Senior Engineering Manager at Intel Corporation and Director of Corporate Quality and Design Research at Herman Miller, underscoring his extensive background in leading quality and design initiatives.

Speech Topics


Collaboration Skills - Resolving Conflict/Managing Options

Better Meetings

Apply Modern Improvement Approaches and Tools Where They Matter Most

Organizational Artificial Harmony

Underdeveloped thinking that emphasizes overly polite and professional discussion and behavior instead of productive communication processes that generate robust dialogue, learning, and significant business results. Organizational artificial harmony hampers innovation and growth by restricting the depth and breadth of ideas that get discussed.

John’s four-part Good Thinking Curriculum is based on the fundamental strategy that improving thinking skills is the key driver to improving business performance. Thinking and intelligence are different. Intelligence is innate capability, and thinking is how you use it. As a skill thinking is improvable.

What differentiates great and not-so-great companies is how they think, and how they help all their leaders and employees learn to think more effectively.

The topics listed below are all about thinking, and learning to think more effectively and creatively, to solve problems, create new alternatives, and improve your company's performance. All sessions are very interactive and based on an organization’s issues and opportunities. Each seminar, meeting, and keynote speech is developed to accomplish specific goals in each client's unique culture.

  1. Better Meetings: Learn to build, maintain, and improve a meeting process for your organization that delivers productive meetings and improved company performance.
  2. Collaboration Skills: Collaboration can be so much more than just assembling as a team to do work. Move past settling for compromise. Learn to build great decisions AND great buy-in.
  3. Creative Thinking Skills: Learn to generate new ideas when you thought you couldn’t think of any more.
  4. Leading Change: Learn more effective ways to think about, and decide about, change and improvements.
  5. Leading Teams: Learn to initiate and support your organization's improvement and innovation teams.
  6. Practical Use of Dr. Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats: As a certified instructor John combines his many years of experience with the simple power of the Six Thinking Hats.
  7. Process Improvement: Solve problems and improve processes throughout your organization by learning to identify and replace sources of waste with new value-added steps.
  8. Scenario Planning: Prepare your organization for a variety of alternative futures in a very productive way.
  9. Strategic Planning: Create an operational planning document that guides company leaders and employees.
  10. Your Title Here: We can also develop in-house and on-site seminars that address your specific topics and culture.

Delivery Options include keynote speeches, customized seminars, and facilitated meetings; this has included helping leadership teams develop their strategic plans. Please contact me to request detailed descriptions of these and other topics.

Presentation Sites in Recent Years include Albuquerque, Ann Arbor, Boston, Brunei, Chicago, Fort Worth, Frankfurt, Ghana, Hong Kong, Houston, Indianapolis, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Malta, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, Shanghai, Singapore, Toronto, Washington DC

Sample Testimonials – See additional testimonials at Linked In

Collaboration Skills ? Concept of thinking about conflict as a source/symptom of waste is powerful. Tool box of countermeasure techniques very useful. ? A dynamic speaker who uses humor to illustrate points and keep the audience's attention. ? High presentation skills and kept audience engaged without doing a lot of exercises. ? This was by far the best presentation I've gone to. ? Very energetic speaker. Good information. Enjoyed the information shared. Used a lot of humor to keep audience interested. ? Great session. Very good presenter. Really kept my interest. ? Please bring him back! Knowledgeable, engaging, entertaining, useful knowledge. ? Great class and presenter. Best session I attended. ? John Canfield was fabulous. We should get more speakers like him or invite him back. ? John was GREAT! I really enjoyed it and it was more relevant to me than most meetings. ? I liked John's humor and ability to adapt to the knowledge level of the audience.

Creative Thinking Skills ? Great session ? John was very good and hit his target. ? This is a great topic to made a lot of interaction with the people. I miss that ? Great session - very good information provided! ? I enjoyed hearing about ways to bring out creativity in others and myself. ? Mr. Canfield's presentation was quite good, he is very funny and his delivery is excellent.
? The practicality of the material and the down to earth delivery was a 'home run'. The slides contained some great take aways. ? Very good speaker. Good content.

Leadership Practices
? John is obviously well read on change management and business philosophies ? A very talented and effective presentation. ? One of the best facilitators I’ve ever seen. ? Excellent presentation of the material and involving all participants ? A very good speaker who kept our interest. ? I wish all our presenters had his style and energy

Six Thinking Hats ? It was a pleasure meeting him, I really enjoyed his presentation. Very interesting and useful. ? Great presentation. I will be reading this book and I am going to suggest it for our company book club meetings ? He was excellent. He was informative as well as entertaining. I would enjoy sitting in for a longer session ? Job well done and wish we had more time for him.

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