Why? Three reasons:

1. It no longer serves the people I serve.
I’m not a blogger. I speak, consult and coach on the leadership of organizational growth.

The people I serve are C-level executives, founder-owners and others tasked with growing organizations, businesses, divisions, departments, projects, groups or teams. And frankly, they no longer read blogs, if they ever did (see point 3 for the main reason why).

You may be amazed at this (because, being here, you obviously do read blogs – and we’ll get to you in a minute), but I can assure you, 90% of the people who run businesses 24/7 for a living only rarely pull up a bunch of bookmarks and read a skad of online content. And if they do, they do so inconsistently, very, very quickly, and with little retention. Fact is, they’re barely clearing their email once a quarter.

People first interact with me because they want tools – tools that will help them grow their organization. They value tools they can use far above comment or opinion. An example: The free assessment that accompanies my book ‘The Synergist’ has been completed over 4,000 times since the book launched on Jan 3rd, and has generated more – and richer – interaction than was generated by a decade of blogging. The same applies to the chapter by chapter resource tools we’re putting online for readers of ‘The Synergist’.

These tools may not have the perceived cachet of a blog, or ‘position me’ as a ‘thought leader’ (*shudder*), but they do help people make a real change, every day, in their leadership abilities and how their organization is growing.

Serving the people I’m here to serve means providing what they need, not what I want.

2. It doesn’t serve you.
I’m pleased that you’re here, and it’s been wonderful to build rich relationships with people like you over the years. I hope we continue to be friends for a very long time.

However, I can only serve your needs in this format around 20% of the time, and here’s why:

One of the delights of the Predictable Success model is that it works for organizations of all sizes, and at all stages of growth. As a consequence, Predictable Success is followed by start-up founders, micro- and solo-preneurs, medium-sized company owners, CEO’s and SVP’s in Fortune 100 organizations and everything in between, including a large number not-for-profit and faith-based leaders.

So guess what happens when I write a blog post? Answer: It’s right on the button for 20% of the readers and ‘interesting’ (at best) for the rest of you.

I don’t like that percentage, and I’m committed to raising it substantially. I want to produce content that wows you every single time. Tools that go right to the heart of where you are. Resources that you can depend on being able to use every single time.

I can’t do that here.

3. The blogging model is dying.
When the supply of something outstrips demand, it becomes commoditized, and I’ve no interest in working in a commoditized environment.

The number of blog posts produced on any given day now far outstrips the number of actual page reads – which, to be truthful, is minuscule. To stand out from this background noise, an entire industry has developed around pimping blogs and individual blog posts, mostly using social media to – frankly – game the system.

I’m not making a moral judgment here, and I’m certainly at taking a dig at anyone, but it’s just not a game I want to play. Nor is it one in which you as the consumer get the best product possible. Competing to get ‘air time’ for a blog post has long meant compromising with titles, content and promotional activities in a way that drives down the quality of the underlying material.

So, what’s next?

Like I say, I want to provide you with world-class content. Content that you can use every time: tools and resources that make you a better growth leader, whatever you’re engaged in, and whatever size your organization is. And while some of those materials may include blog-like commentary and opinion from me, it should only form part of the whole, and even then it must be highly highly focused to your specific needs.

Interested?

Want to hold hands with me, jump off this lumbering, stops-at-all-the-stations local steam train, on to a speed-of-light bullet train that’s going only – and directly – to your chosen destination?

Click here and hop on board. You’ll enjoy the ride, I promise.

Some Processors are truly geniuses in how they use their P skills, but the sheer brilliance they exude in doing so is not the same as being a Visionary – even though, at first glance or from a distance they might look the same.

Some companies – especially in the tech arena – are suffering from this category error. It took Jerry Yang almost 15 years to work this out (even though Yahoo [YHOO] shareholders got there long before he did). Everybody realized it in the case of Bill Gates at Microsoft [MSFT] (including I think, Bill Gates himself). I believe time will show it to be true of Larry Page at Google [GOOG].

Tech isn’t alone in making this mistake, mind you. Vikram Pandit is a P struggling mightily at Citibank [C] at a time when it desperately needs a V. Leo Apotheker fooled no-one in his short, ignominious stay at HP [HWP].

That’s not to say there aren’t times when a Processor isn’t the right person to lead a company – BP [BP] needed one a decade ago, and if it had one, it might have avoided the recent spill disaster. JetBlue [JBLU] needed one coming out of the David Neieleman Whitewater experience, and Netflix [NFLX] could do with one now. Almost all of Japanese industry benefitted from Processor leadership in the 80′s.

Just don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ve got a Visionary leader when you’ve actually got a pyrotechnically brilliant Processor – it’s a very expensive mistake to make.

After about two decades and 10,000-plus attendees some pattern recognition kicked in (I can be a little slow about these things). I realized that within two minutes of meeting a workshop participant I could tell with a high degree of certitude whether or not they were going to get anything substantial out of the process.

Workshop attendees come in many shapes and sizes, and I’ve seen ‘em all many times. From the late-arriving, multi-tasking “I’m really too busy to actually be here” types to the slow-and-steady capture-every-word tortoises (I mean that non-pejoratively); the suck-the-air-out-of-the-room grandstanders and the quiet geniuses; the terminally unsure and the defiantly unshakeable – I’ve worked with them all, and everything in between.

Of course by far the majority of workshop attendees are people just like you and me, solid types who arrive with reasonable expectations and a desire to take something away with them that they can put into practice back at the ranch, and as a result make a real change in their lives, their career and/or their business. They arrive, participate and leave just like the characters above, but without falling into any defined type or group – just fine, ‘normal’, unique individuals.

And here’s the interesting thing: when it comes to spotting those who will achieve real change as a result of devoting a morning, a day or a week to a workshop, none of the above matters. Personal style, presuppositions, how or why someone participates – none of these factors really make a difference.

What does make a difference – the factors that determine whether or not the next conference or workshop you go to will yield a high ROI for you or not, are delightfully prosaic. This is good news – it means that anyone can turn a good workshop into a game-changing experience, if they take the right steps. (I’m assuming presenter competence and quality of content here – nobody can squeeze high ROI out of crap, unless they’re in the waste management business.)

What used to amaze me is the small percentage of people who actually take those steps. And it really is a tiny percentage: I’d put it at less than 5%. That means just 2 attendees in a room of 50 people will make something real and measurable happen as a direct result of the next workshop or conference they attend.

I say ‘used to amaze me’ because the percentage is so small that I set out to discover both what those steps are, and more importantly, why most people don’t take them.

In a way, I had no choice. I run high-risk workshops (not that we do anything dramatic – I’m teaching organizational growth and leadership after all, so no-one is going to die if anything goes wrong) but I teach a methodology that makes big claims for those who will implement it, and I couldn’t – can’t – afford to see 95% of the attendees not ‘get it’. Also, because I restrict public workshops to just 10 people, a 5% hit rate means I might deliver 2 or 3 workshops without helping someone make real, significant, game-changing change in their life, career or business – and that’s the precise opposite of why I do what I do.

So, after a few years of intently observing the patterns of highly successful workshop attendees I was able to identify the specific steps those people take to ensure game-changing results from their workshop or seminar attendance. I found out (as I indicated earlier) that the steps involved are simple, even prosaic, but incredibly powerful.

Along the way, I also discovered that the main reason 95% of workshop attendees don’t take these steps is not because the steps are complicated – quite the opposite – but that they simply simply don’t have time to think of them. So, eventually I turned it in to a PDF that I now send ahead of time to everyone who signs up for a Predictable Success workshop.

Today, I’m making it available to everyone. If you’re going to a workshop, seminar or convention this year, print it out, read it and act on it – and I guarantee you’ll be highly rewarded. Enjoy.

Well, one reason of course is the nature of reporting: good stories don’t sell newspaper inches (or screen pixels), so the icky stuff gets featured much more heavily. But there is a deeper issue: The glorification of the leader as hero personified.

We live in a 24-hour news cycle which must, in order to not seem like simply a random collection of talking heads, impose a narrative on events. At the time of writing we see it most clearly in the reporting of the current election campaign. Nothing is simply an event, a fact or a statement, instead everything must be parsed as part of an over-arching narrative – who’s up, who’s down, who’s next, who’s out?

The same thing happens in financial reporting. Everything needs to play out as a greek tragedy, with heroes, villains, victims and innocent bystanders.

As a result, when a crisis strikes, some unlucky so-and-so gets pushed to the top of the news cycle, and his or her leadership style is placed under the microscope.

And guess what happens? The Visionary-, Operator- or Processor- leader finds their every move under scrutiny, and as a direct result, their V, O or P response becomes supercharged. Time and again we see Visionary leaders under pressure who take even more risks, resort to even more hyperbole, swing even further for the fences than before. Or an Operator-leader who becomes more dogged, more stubborn, more ferocious than previously. Or a Processor-leader who retreats behind more spreadsheets, more planning, more second-guessing than before the crisis hit.

The answer? Behind any well-managed crisis you’ll find either a natural Synergist (very rare) or more commonly, a Synergistic team – one which knows that the answer to a crisis is not V-ing, O-ing or P-ing your way through it, but using the team’s natural VOP strengths in harmony, and with the proper choreography.