A well-known principle to advance your company, cause, or career is called the mastermind group. The concept was popularized by Napoleon Hill, who wrote the classic motivational book, Think and Grow Rich, after he spent more than twenty years interviewing the most successful people of his time and found what they had in common.
One of their keys to success was something he dubbed a “mastermind alliance.” Hill defined it as follows: “The mastermind principle consists of an alliance of two or more minds working in perfect harmony for the attainment of a common definite objective. Success does not come without the cooperation of others.”
Some popular peer groups built on this principle are Vistage, Renaissance Forums, and Entrepreneurial Edge. There is also a new mastermind for the 21st century that is taking off.
The Executive Next Practices Institute (ENP) is a mastermind organization comprised of Fortune 5000 C-level and top functional leaders (CEO, CFO, CMO, HR, CIO, Board Directors) who meet to discuss innovative business and leadership strategies.
Roundtable sessions are held with a strict non-solicitation policy to encourage leaders to interact, engage, and think collaboratively, and to ensure maximum relationship-building.
Founded by my long-time business associate Scott Hamilton, I like the ENP model because it follows a “
As the ENP publishing practice leader, I help book authors to speak at ENP events and work with ENP members to get published. If you are an author with a message for the C-suite, speaking at an ENP event should be on your must do list. But you need to be prepared to talk about the future, not the past.
“In an age where business models become obsolete within 24 months or less, the need to think beyond status quo strategy, practices and mindset has been become critical for all leaders,” says Hamilton.
This environment spawned the creation of the ENP Forums by Hamilton in 2009. When Hamilton looked at how companies operated and approached improvement, he observed that many leaders relied on legacy and linear thinking as a starting point for innovation.
“These methods would not serve them as well in a light speed economy where long standing business models were being disrupted seemingly overnight,” says Hamilton.
In addition, many new entrants and competitors have emerged from adjacent or even remote industry verticals to challenge incumbents. Hamilton refers to it as the “Uberization” of an industry space.
Hamilton saw part of the answer to this situation was to gather top leaders in cross-functional and cross-vertical live forums to explore emerging trends and potentially transformative strategies around the principle of “next practices.”
“Next practices refers to a mindset and approach that discards what others have been doing and looks for a way that represents a fundamental shift in the creation of value and relevance,” says Hamilton.
As the ENP Forums themselves evolved, top executives like Phil Molyneux, former Chairman of SONY Electronics attended and shared the core of his disruptive strategies in concise, content rich presentations to the ENP attendees. The sessions were designed as highly interactive and collaborative exchanges among the speakers and C-suite attendees, thus ensuring that substantive ideas could be formulated and tested.
Guy Marsala, former CEO of Jiffy Lube, says of ENP Forums: “These are the best forums for truly getting a 360 perspective on the mission critical challenges and opportunities that face middle to large cap companies and share, real-time, creative and practical new ways of moving forward.”
The ENP Forums focus on broad range of challenges ranging from customer centricity to financial literacy to healthcare policy trends. Every session features top experts sharing the best of their expertise and then tapping into the collective intelligence of the attending executives, usually 150 or more per forum.
“Taking risks and avoiding the legacy approach to solving problems is a tough challenge for many leaders” says Hamilton. “it requires them to leverage both their emotional and business intelligence and tap into that of their peers, stakeholders and team.”
Where does the Executive Next Practices Institute go from here?
“By the fact we are known for this ‘anti-status quo’ thinking, we may not even call our organization by the same name or be structured the same way 18 months from now. We’ll keep looking for the next thing that brings even more enlightenment, effectiveness and ROI to our attendees,” says Hamilton.
