ThePRFreelancer Current Titles:

Identify the real problem. Don’t waste time and money solving the wrong problem.

Consistently create ideas. Make your business recession-proof and competition-proof.

Grow your business. Solve the tough problems holding you back.

Leading in today’s world is difficult, and it is not getting easier. To compete and be profitable in today’s marketplace, you need big, creative solutions and you need them now. Just as you follow a recipe to cook a great meal, there is a recipe to create great ideas. Create in a Flash is based on Dr. Roger Firestien’s 40 years helping companies unleash the innovation of their workforce. Roger’s clients include AT&T, SC Johnson, Disney, Hilton, NASA and over 600 other organizations big and small, including corporations, government, universities and churches.

Roger L. Firestien, PhD, has presented programs on innovation to over 600 organizations around the world including Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies, universities, associations, and religious institutions.

His expert views on creativity have been covered in Fast Company, Forbes, Investor’s Business Daily, Inc. and The New York Times.

He is Associate Professor Emeritus at the Center for Applied Imagination at Buffalo State University, President of Innovation Resources, Inc., a founding member of the Buffalo Society for Creativity in Medical Education, and guest lecturer at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, NY.

The corporate landscape is littered with companies whose leaders made the wrong decisions. In CREATE THE FUTURE: Powerful Decision-Making Tools For Your Company And Yourself, corporate leader, board member, and keynote speaker Rick Williams provides a guidebook for leaders who want to turn their leadership team into a powerful creative engine – imagining where an organization can go, defining the best options, and developing a concrete plan for getting there.

The book presents a straightforward, concrete, structured process – from starting with the challenge to ending with a decision. Filled with case studies, critical examples, and drawing on his decades of experience as a company founder and management consultant, Williams offers a strategic methodology complete with planning and decision-making tools – some of which he developed and others he adapted from those used by leading consultants, coaches, and skilled leaders.

Rick Williams is an internationally published author. He is a frequent speaker and writer on best practices for leadership and decision-making.

Williams began his career as a physicist developing space- and defense-related systems. After Harvard Business School, Williams joined the global consulting firm Arthur D. Little, Inc., where he worked on business strategy and acquisitions and the economic and strategic impact of government policy and regulations on a broad spectrum of industries. He then founded and served as CEO of The Equity Company, an award-winning real estate investment and development firm.

Williams’ recent work includes serving on the board of directors of technology companies. He has served as board chairman of a medical device company and a bank/venture capital firm. He has also served on the national board for the Private Directors Association and as president of the Harvard Business School Association of Boston and other non-profit boards. Williams is an honors physics graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, a winning sailboat racer, and an avid photographer.

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WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER 

USA TODAY BESTSELLER

 In a world characterized by constant change, individuals and organizations need to pivot to adapt. In EVERYTHING CONNECTS:  Cultivating Mindfulness, Creativity, And Innovation For Long-term Value. Entrepreneur, thought leader, and innovator Faisal Hoque shows how to thrive in the environment of change in which we live and work.

The book – a revision of the first edition of EVERYTHING CONNECTS – includes new material on changes due to the pandemic, mindfulness and resiliency, all designed to help leverage and thrive in the flickering environment of change. These additional topics add substance to the seminal focus of the original edition, and further the core message that everything has a relationship to everything else, resulting in a powerful synergy.

Part philosophy, part business, and part history, this book is a kaleidoscopic view of the way humans―by being able to think out of the box―have been able to achieve greatness for themselves, their organizations, and the world at large.

Faisal Hoque is an accomplished entrepreneur, senior executive, author, thought leader, public speaker, and advisor to management teams and BODs with more than 25 years of cross-industry success. He is the founder of SHADOKA, NextChapter, and other companies; they focus on enabling sustainable and transformational changes.

In today’s complex, ambiguous world of work, leaders can’t rely on data and models alone. The difference between good and bad decisions often rests on intuition. In INTUITION AT WORK: Using Your Gut Feelings To Get Ahead, executive coach Jessica Pryce-Jones shares how intuition helps senior leaders and their teams arrive at important decisions, explains what intuition is, what forms it takes, and how to be more attentive to its cues.

The benefits of intuitive decision-making, as detailed in the stories and exercises in INTUITION AT WORK, will result in greater responsiveness, flexibility, and improved organizational performance.

Jessica Pryce-Jones started her career in finance where she learned about numbers, strategy and leadership. After ten years in the corporate world, she completed a psychology degree – she wanted to understand why some of her bosses were brilliant and others were dismal. Those insights launched a new career facilitating, coaching, designing interventions and writing.

Clients include multinationals in healthcare, professional services, FMCG, banking, creative, education, manufacturing, publishing and engineering industries as well as the public and not-for-profit sectors.

She has written two previous books, Happiness at Work: Maximizing Your Psychological Capital for Success and Running Great Meetings & Workshops for Dummies.

#1 WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER

USA TODAY BESTSELLER

Transformational leaders will leverage positive change

In a world of explosive change and transformation, leaders at all levels―from heads of state and global corporations to entrepreneurs and gig economists―will offer the best opportunity for leveraging change and transforming our lives for the better. This includes how we work, play, govern ourselves, and consider and plan for our collective futures.

This thought-provoking book invites you to explore the intersection of transformational leadership, systemic thinking, and experiential learning―all required to survive and thrive the tsunami of changes and disruptions caused by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and misinformation trends.

Faisal Hoque is an accomplished entrepreneur, senior executive, author, thought leader, public speaker, and advisor to management teams and BODs with more than 25 years of cross-industry success. He is the founder of SHADOKA, NextChapter, and other companies; they focus on enabling sustainable and transformational changes.

In REINVENT: Navigating Business Transformation In A Hyperdigital Era, entrepreneur, innovator, and advisor with more than twenty-five years of cross-industry success, Faisal Hoque, makes the argument for reinvention – from the changing nature of consumers to shifting workforce priorities to the necessity for greater organizational security. Hoque introduces ideas, concepts, and a comprehensive framework (LIFTS — learn, investigate, formulate, take off, and study) to help position organizations to reap the benefits of business and digital transformation.

The skills and mindset taught in the book will equip transformational leaders to manage ongoing change and adjust to the upheavals that are taking place everywhere.

Faisal Hoque is the founder of SHADOKA, NextChapter, and other companies that focus on enabling sustainable and transformational changes. Throughout his career, he has developed over 20 commercial business and technology platforms and worked with public and private sector giants such as the US Department of Defense, GE, MasterCard, American Express, Northrop Grumman, CACI, PepsiCo, IBM, Home Depot, Gartner, and JPMorgan Chase. He is a 3 time winning Founder and CEO of Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ awards

Entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and business owners must prepare for a future in which subject matter expertise will no longer suffice. To remain relevant – and to prepare for the next inevitable crisis – they must learn essential skills, understand themselves, and shift their mindsets accordingly. As strategy consultant Alex Brueckmann says in SECRETS OF NEXT-LEVEL ENTREPRENEURS: 11 Powerful Lessons To Thrive In Business And Lead A Balanced Life, the time is now to grow beyond existing limits – personally and professionally.

The book discusses three mission-critical pillars that contribute to building future-proof businesses: strategy, leadership, and self-care. “It’s essential to strategically re-adjust a business for success, consciously shape leadership and culture, and practice self-care as we humbly accept our limitations as entrepreneurs and leaders,” says Brueckmann.

A singular and powerful collection of resources for entrepreneurs, founders, managers, executives, board members, and other business leaders, this book is essential reading for the future of businesses worldwide.

Alex Brueckmann is a strategy facilitator, speaker, and author. He talks about the power of strategy and identity, transformation leadership, purpose, impact, and legacy. Alex has impacted thousands of business leaders across the world, from multinationals to start-ups.

 He is an alumnus of EBS European Business School (Germany), and holds certificates in change management, leadership, finance, organizational development, and strategy from INSEAD (France), and Harvard Business School (USA)

People train longer, specialize more, use ever-advancing technologies and still manage to solve the wrong problems. Why? Because they have been taught that when they face problems big or small, their initial impression/definition/hunch of what they think is the problem really is the problem, notes renowned innovation consultant Roger L. Firestien, PhD, in SOLVE THE REAL PROBLEM: Because What You Think Is The Problem Is Usually Not The Problem.

With all the information that they have at their fingertips, people still misdiagnose illnesses, create educational programs that don’t help students, sink millions into business plans that never get off the ground, and overlook simple details that cost time, energy and lives. “We

have been taught to find answers to problems, not to question the problem itself,” says Firestien.

Roger L. Firestien, PhD, has presented programs on innovation to over 600 organizations around the world including Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies, universities, associations, and religious institutions.

His expert views on creativity have been covered in Fast Company, Forbes, Investor’s Business Daily, Inc. and The New York Times.

He is Associate Professor Emeritus at the Center for Applied Imagination at Buffalo State University, President of Innovation Resources, Inc., a founding member of the Buffalo Society for Creativity in Medical Education, and guest lecturer at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, NY.

Leaders of B2C and B2B organizations – irrespective of size, geography and industry sector – need a tried-and-tested approach to improve their customer experience. To stay ahead of the competition and meet the evolving demands of empowered, values-driven customers, organizations need to embrace the age of the customer and implement multi-channel strategies. The key lies in values-driven organizational alignment designed for an organization’s unique situation, all underpinned by a customer experience mindset and the ‘human touch’.

In SUPERCHARGING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: How Organizational Alignment Drives Performance, customer experience and business transformation experts Alan Williams and Dave Stubberfield provide a methodology and framework that has successfully been adopted by large and small companies, across sectors.

Alan Williams, Founder & MD, SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL Ltd, coaches progressive leaders of service sector organizations, internationally, to deliver values-driven service for sustained performance.

With more than 20 years’ senior management experience in demanding customer service environments, Williams’ rare mix of extensive operations and coaching experience enables him to create and implement holistic SERVICEBRAND® strategies for sustainable impact. He has applied this approach as a consultant and in senior leadership roles for global blue-chip organizations as well as smaller entrepreneurial companies.

Dave Stubberfield is Director & Principal Consultant, Carter Consultancy. With over a decade’s worth of experience in business transformation, has been involved with and managed complex and comprehensive projects to improve a variety of businesses with a customer-centric focus. By empowering people from the ground up and gaining total sponsorship from senior leaders, Stubberfield ensures complete coverage of the transformation across the organization. He applies his expertise in continuous improvement, customer experience and change management to create bespoke implementation solutions for businesses of all sizes and reach their goals, embedding and sustaining these methodologies.

Anyone who has ever engaged in fishing, for recreation or for a living, knows that it is about interacting and learning from nature – the wisest leadership coach available. It is deep thinking, hard work, and an enhanced mindset. In THE FISHERMAN’S PATH TO LEADERSHIP: 224 Lessons From The Wisdom Of Nature, global thought leader Oleg Konovalov reveals how the secrets of nature can be leveraged to become a better leader.

Illustrated by his own experiences working on deep-sea trawlers in the North Atlantic and fly fishing for salmon in the Arctic rivers, the book draws parallels between fishing and leadership, as both require knowledge, experience, technical ability, and intuition. “Fishing is a labor of love. Leadership is a labor of love. Love and care are my tackle to catch people’s hearts and minds,” says Konovalov.

Dr. Oleg Konovalov is a global thought leader, author, business educator, consultant, and C-suite coach. Konovalov has been named one of the top eight global experts in leadership and shortlisted for the Distinguished Award in Leadership by Thinkers50. He is on Global Gurus Top 30 in Leadership, is the #1 Global Leading Coach (Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 Award), and has been named one of the Global 100 Inspirational Leaders 2022, along with Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Oprah Winfrey. Having been named ‘the da Vinci of Visionary Leadership’ by many leading authorities of our time, Konovalov is considered #1 in the world in the field of vision and visionary leadership. He is the author of The Vision Code, Leaderology, and other books.

Today’s Baby Boomers – like their parents, the World War II generation – grew up witnessing events that rocked society in politics, warfare, civil rights, art, music, and science. In THE MAGICAL DECADE: A Personal Memoir And Popular History Of 1965-75, physician and author David Chudwin chronicles how the changes during 1965–1975 altered the course of American history. Reviewing these events five decades later brings to Baby Boomers a sense of nostalgia as well as pride.

Baby Boomers went through a period of social, political, and cultural changes in almost every endeavor. The book is about the enormity of those changes and how they affected the author during that crucial time of his development. “There were more changes in more fields during The Magical Decade than perhaps during any other decade in American history,” says Chudwin.

David Chudwin MD was born mid-century in 1950 in Chicago, Illinois. During his formative years from ages 15 to 25, he was an eyewitness to historical events ranging from a concert by The Beatles to anti-war protests to the first Moon landing. He is the author of I Was A Teenage Space Reporter (LID Publishing, 2019), based on his Apollo 11 experiences. Chudwin decided to go into medicine rather than journalism, earned his MD degree and just retired after four decades as a practicing allergist.

In his new book, THE POWER OF CLOSURE: Why We Want It, How to Get It, and When to Walk Away, psychotherapist Gary McClain fills in the gaps, defines what closure is and is not, the reasons for wanting it – some healthy, some not so healthy – and discusses concrete steps people can take to seek it in productive and meaningful ways.

The basic truth about closure is that sometimes people find the closure they want, and sometimes they have to walk away. “Walking away from the closure they thought they needed and realize they can’t have can be an act of empowerment. That’s the power of closure: It makes an impact on you when you find it and when you don’t,” says McClain.

Whether dealing with the pain of loss or anger over workplace issues or job loss, THE POWER OF CLOSURE will help readers let go of the past and embrace the future.

Gary McClain, PhD, is an educator, psychotherapist, relationship coach, and author, based in New York City. He also works with employees onsite at local corporations as a mental health professional and is an adjunct faculty member at Montclair State University in the graduate program in mental health and at Excelsior University in health sciences, where he was named the Distinguished Faculty Member in 2013 and received the Faculty Scholarship Award in 2023.

McClain is also a frequent speaker at corporate meetings, delivering various mental health presentations at companies and organizations. Topics include communication for couples, teamwork, burnout, stress management, and managing anxious thoughts.

McClain has written many articles in a series he calls “Chronic Communication Skills.” Articles in this series are published on his website as well as in the publications he contributes to.

What separates competent leaders from true visionaries? This question is vital for those who wish to leave a positive legacy on their clients, customers, employees, and society. In THE STRATEGY LEGACY: How To Future-Proof A Business And Leave Your Mark, strategy and leadership expert Alex Brueckmann argues that great leaders are distinguished by their ability to combine strategy with organizational identity, focusing not only on what they do, and why, but beyond.

Brueckmann’s goal is to help leaders understand business strategy as the number one driver of both corporate culture and commercial success. “I would like you to approach strategy by decoupling the topic from the metaphorical ivory towers of corporate functions and put strategy at the heart of your organization’s identity,” he says.

Whether a corporate leader, an entrepreneur, or a startup founder, readers of THE STRATEGY LEGACY will be equipped to boost their business and leave a positive impression across the board.

Alex Brueckmann is an executive thought partner, strategy facilitator, speaker, and author of Secrets Of Next Level Entrepreneurs: 11 Powerful Lessons To Thrive In Business And Lead A Balanced Life. He talks about the power of strategy and identity, transformation leadership, purpose, impact, and legacy. Brueckmann has impacted thousands of business leaders across the world, from multinationals to start-ups.

He is an alumnus of EBS European Business School (Germany), and holds certificates in change management, leadership, finance, organizational development, and strategy from INSEAD (France), and Harvard Business School (USA).

Why Didn’t I Think of That?

…we’ve all asked the question one time or another. The answer is almost always the same. When we miss opportunities, it’s because we’re not looking for problems to solve.

Why Didn’t I Think of That? is a short story we can all relate to, shedding an eye-opening light on our classic approaches to work and problem solving.

You’ll discover how to innovate on demand, develop more options, and implement ideas that make a difference.

Creativity is a skill. Just like you learned how to ride a bicycle, you can learn how to be creative. In Why Didn’t I Think of That? you will learn how to turn on your creativity at will instead of waiting for ideas to happen.

Roger L. Firestien, PhD, has presented programs on innovation to over 600 organizations around the world including Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies, universities, associations, and religious institutions.

His expert views on creativity have been covered in Fast Company, Forbes, Investor’s Business Daily, Inc. and The New York Times.

He is Associate Professor Emeritus at the Center for Applied Imagination at Buffalo State University, President of Innovation Resources, Inc., a founding member of the Buffalo Society for Creativity in Medical Education, and guest lecturer at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, NY.