Learn from the best in business
Founded in 1972, the Franklin University Speakers Bureau provides presentations of various lengths and topics by faculty and staff.
Speakers can be arranged for meetings, development series, training sessions, and other civic gatherings. Designed as part of the University's ongoing commitment to community involvement and development, the presentations are offered free of charge.
With experts in a variety of fields, the Franklin Speakers Bureau features dynamic presentations on topics in the categories of leadership, business issues, motivation/team building, marketing/sales, career/workplace satisfaction, communication/public relations, and more.
To schedule a speaker, please complete and submit the form on the right, preferably four to six weeks in advance of your event date.
- Business Ethics: Its Role in Organizational Leadership
If ethics are poor at the top, that behavior is copied down through the organization. This presentation focuses on the connection between leadership, effective decision-making, social responsibility, and long-term strategic planning. It also discusses the importance of following a decision and making models to improve performance.
- Board Development
- Board Governance
- Board/CEO Relationship
- Direction-Alignment-Commitment (DAC): A New Model for Leadership
The traditional leader-follower-goal model of leadership has difficulty explaining work processes when leadership is shared or virtual enterprise networks are formed. This presentation will demonstrate how the direction-alignment-commitment (DAC) model moves the focus of leadership to a higher level, incorporating both the traditional model and new ways of accomplishing the tasks of leadership within an organization.
- Effective and Non-Effective Leadership Styles
This presentation addresses the range of leadership styles and their related strengths and weaknesses. It also discusses the optimal leadership competencies needed by today's leaders.
- Leadership and Ethics
Your leadership ethics and values should be visible because you live them in your actions every single day. This topic focuses on how ethics form the foundation for successful personal and professional leadership.
- Leadership Style and its Effect on Organizational Culture and Performance
This presentation shows how the style of a leader is both mediated by and impacts an organization's culture - and ultimately, its performance.
- Management and Leading: The Franklin University Program for Today’s Managers and Leaders
Franklin University's redesigned Management Major synthesizes the areas of managing people, making effective decisions, understanding human behavior, implementing change initiatives, and learning core transformational leadership competencies. This presentation will demonstrate the impact the major will have on preparing individuals to lead organizations.
- Transformational Leadership: Changing Self, Others, and the Organization
This presentation discusses the four key components of transformational leadership and how they can develop both the leader and the follower.
- What Coaching Can Do for Your Organization
In this session you will learn about the differences between coaching, mentoring, and counseling, as well as how coaching situations, processes, and goal-setting can be used to strengthen your organization.
- Aligning Stages of Change
Organizations don't change until individuals make the personal choice to change. However, members of organizations are often at different stages of the personal change process. Learn how to prevent change initiatives from being directed at the wrong stage of change with the incorrect approach and message.
- Be Pro-Growth and Embrace Creativity
Are you positioned for growth? You should always be thinking about new strategies, products, and services. Learn how your organization can foster creativity and how to reduce the obstacles to innovation to become "pro-growth."
- Better Decision Making
This workshop will provide you with some easy-to-use tools and methods for making better decisions.
- Current Trends in Pay for Performance
This presentation discusses how companies are evaluating their compensation budgets and practices following the recent economic downturn. Topics include the role of various pay forms, effective use of incentive pay, and challenges associated with merit base pay increases.
- Mergers and Acquisitions: A Human Resources Perspective
Don't let anyone tell you that a merger or acquisition is the union or marriage of two sets of employees. This presentation will explain how it's more like two people who have never dated and now are thrown together because of the wishes of stockholders or boards.
Have you heard of the "Arab spring" and the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries? Are you scared about the future of Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid? What role do you have to play in the global market - are you financially secure, or should you buy gold and hunker down? Find out in this session on macroeconomics.
Want to know why your neighbor is unemployed? Wishing you could understand the crazy rises and falls in gas and food prices? Do you think the time is right for you to start - or get out of - your own business? Microeconomics helps to explain these ideas and more.
- Organizational Culture: Its Role and Impact
This presentation focuses on the behavior that is adopted as the norm within an organization as initially established by a founding father and how it changes due to the values and beliefs subsequent leaders and followers bring to the organization. It also addresses the potential strength and effectiveness of organizational culture and behavior on all stakeholders.
- Organizational Change Management: How to Lead the Change
This presentation focuses on the importance of adaptive organizations and the inclusion of all stakeholders in a change process.
- Organizations Reorganized for the Future
Learn how your organization can accommodate the needs and conflicting demands of its people using principles of reciprocity as well as motivate, engage, and cross-pollinate its people and their ideas, knowledge, and points of view.
- Senior Executive Pay: Too Much or Too Little?
Are senior executives fairly paid or should they make more? Do the S&P 500 senior executives get paid too much? Does the pay structure for senior executives need fixing? This presentation will examine pay for senior executives throughout the world, focusing on their positioning and whether or not these systems should be repaired.
- Strategic Planning: Its Importance - Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
This presentation focuses on the key steps of crafting a sound strategic plan, underscoring that any plan is living and evolving, which results in continual planning.
- Succession Planning
Learn how to maintain continuity and progress toward the attainment of long-term strategic goals by creating a human resource strategy for ensuring the right people are developed and ready for the right roles.
- Succession Plans: How They Affect Women and Promotions
This presentation will focus on succession plans and some common questions that often come up. Are succession plans for everyone? Do they help break the glass ceiling? And how do women fit in?
- Training That Works
How can you increase the effectiveness of your training programs? What are the most important principles and methods for teaching knowledge and skills? This presentation provides research-based methods and tools for improving training and instruction in your organization.
- Trends in Business Education
Shifts in the global economy and competitive demands of near-constant change require business managers to have a new set of skills for problem solving and approaches to leadership. This presentation will focus on these shifts and how business schools have been evaluating the impact these trends might have on learning outcomes and curriculum changes.
- Understanding Organizational Change From the Perspective of Complexity Science
What do the terms "butterfly effect," "tipping point," and "edge of chaos" have to do with understanding organizational dynamics and how change occurs? Learn how complexity science is starting to influence the way we understand organizations and how they might change to meet our growing challenges as we move deeper into the Knowledge Era.
- Employee Motivation/Development
Without guidance, it's easy to feel like you're just another brick in the wall. Being able to break down some of the "HR-ese" and assessing your own knowledge, skills and abilities will help you to gain confidence and will help you to advance in both professional and personal settings.
This presentation is a cross-cultural perspective focusing on what mentoring does for both mentors and mentees.
- Motivating Yourself and Others
- Motivation Workshop
- Retaining the Best and the Brightest
- Team Building
- Direct Marketing
- Introduction to Hispanic Marketing
This presentation focuses on what is meant by the term "Hispanic marketing," reviews key demographic trends, and addresses common misconceptions.
- Marketing Positioning
- Marketing Your Business on a Limited Budget
This discussion focuses on what it really means to market a business in a cost-effective way.
- What to Expect From an Ad Agency
This discussion covers the role advertising agencies play and what business realistically can expect from them.
- Career Change
Some Chinook salmon actually change their sex as they migrate. People don't usually have the same capacity to change careers in midstream. This presentation will show how to make that push to get us moving in a new direction.
- Career Planning
When you choose a career, you should go through a four-step process: self, options, match, and action. Through this presentation, you will learn what all of these terms mean and how they can enhance your own career.
- Career Selection
Imagine that you could do anything - without the necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities. This presentation will help you take that answer and turn it into a fulfilling career.
- Choosing the Right Career Path to Happiness
An in-depth presentation addressing how to choose the career path that's best for you.
This presentation will explain how coaching is a method of directing, instructing, and training a person or group of people, with the aim to achieve a goal or develop specific career or life skills.
- Human Resource Management: An Evolving Identity
This presentation focuses on HRM's transition from "personnel" to a more strategic business function. Examples are provided from one company's experience, and particular attention is paid to the evolving role of HR professionals.
- Job Search 101
A 3-part model of a successful job search is reviewed, with emphasis on practical tips and tools that can be immediately put into practice by individuals. Actual experience in hiring from the inside of company HR departments is used as the basis for a realistic discussion of the distinguishing factors of a successful job search.
- Maintaining Balance: Your Personal and Professional Life
Tools and tips for achieving balance between your personal and professional life.
- Welcoming Unexpected Job or Career Change
Change happens to everyone. Whether that change is planned or is forced, choices can be made about how to proceed through the transition that change offers. By understanding the nature of the Ending, by patiently working through the challenges of the Neutral Zone, and by opening ourselves to subtle and unremarkable new Beginnings - everyone can successfully navigate change in any area of our lives.
- Communication Trend-Watch: 2012
Social media, globalization, the "greening" of business, transparency, and consumer thrift - all can be identified as trends with lasting and important implications for business communications and communication professionals. Explore how these trends are manifesting in business practice and what it might mean for your organization.
- Communication Workshop
How you can improve internal or external communication by following a few simple but vital steps.
- Crisis Communication Workshop
Find out how your organization can avoid a media crisis and what to do if one happens.
- Improving Business Communication
This presentation explores the dos and don'ts of business communication, using examples of good and bad communication to demonstrate the best ways and what kinds of information to communicate.
- Public Relations Workshop
This presentation explores the fundamentals of public relations, including good speechwriting, how to prepare for a press conference, and creating a strong strategic PR plan.
- Social Media: Preserve Your Authentic Self
Social media networks, especially Twitter and Linked In, are touted as great ways to "sell" your business and yourself and can be very effective in reaching audiences and building your brand. But your messages need to be consistent with who you are and what you do. Learn how to get your message across and create a dialogue with customers or prospective employers while preserving what makes you special.
- Artificial Intelligence
This presentation covers a variety of topics, primarily focusing on the construction of intelligent systems and their interaction with humans and what we can learn from modeling human intelligence.
- Cyber Culture/Pop Culture and Technology
This presentation demonstrates how new directions in technology are bringing us together, not driving us apart, while also highlighting new challenges to how we communicate.
- Software Architecture
This presentation focuses on large-scale architecture and current techniques like SOA and clouds.
- Cultural Relativism and the Problem of Fit: Classroom, Workplace, and Society
- Getting the Most From Your Volunteers
- Non-Profit/Volunteer Management
- The Non-Profit Organization: Reaching the Vision
This presentation focuses on the interplay between volunteers, staff, and the methods to carry out the mission and reach the vision in today's non-profit organization.
- The Nexus Between Institutional Biography and Social Change