Date: March 19, 2021

Time:  Noon to 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

Platform: Zoom

Click here for free ticket: Jerry Zimmerman  (You can share with friends and if you miss it we will send you a link.)

All types of organizations, for profit, not-for-profit, lawful, and unlawful, must be relentless in highly competitive, and constantly evolving environments. Every day iconic brands like Sears, Kodak, and Blockbuster vanish. Managers in lawful companies face disruptive technologies, groundbreaking new products, and competition from new entrants. Every organization must manage its way through a rapidly shifting world, or else fail. Yet some organized crime syndicates last decades despite massive law enforcement efforts and rival gangs directed at their daily demise.

The American Mafia, which burgeoned during Prohibition in the 1920s, still operates in the twenty-first century. The Sinaloa Cartel remains the largest smuggler of drugs into the US, despite jailing its leader, El Chapo Guzmán, in a US supermax prison. How do these criminal syndicates survive, and even thrive? They apply fundamental economic principles to devise management practices that channel their heinous members' self-interest to achieve the syndicates' objectives.

Relentless uses the most unexpected organizations, crime syndicates, to elucidate essential economic concepts that allow all leaders to build stronger, more robust companies. These concepts align the organization's business strategy and employee empowerment, incentives, and corporate culture. These principles attract the right people to create resourceful, market-obsessed, and relentless high-performance teams. Understanding the management practices devised by mobsters illustrates the economic concepts that lawful managers also must heed. While lawful managers cannot simply follow the business practices of mobsters, they must apply the same fundamental principles described in Relentless.

Author

For over 40 years, Jerold L. Zimmerman taught organizational economics, accounting, and finance at the University of Rochester Simon Business School. He has served on public-company boards of directors, and has been a visiting scholar at numerous international universities. He has consulted with numerous clients, including Fortune 500 companies and management advisory firms, to demonstrate how the principles of organizational economics can improve a firm's culture and eventually its performance. As an expert witness, he testifies on questions of organizational control, profitability, and performance measurement.

Zimmerman's 50 published studies and books include textbooks on accounting and economics and a trade book about designing organizations that create value. Zimmerman's research has been recognized with several prestigious honors by the American Accounting Association and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. His economics and accounting textbooks are used at leading international universities.

He is a founding editor of the Journal of Accounting and Economics, one of the most highly referenced peer-reviewed journal in economics. He earned a PhD in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley, after receiving a BS in finance from the University of Colorado.

Daniel Patrick Forrester founded THRUUE, Inc., an expert consultancy that supports leaders and boards bridge the gap between strategy and culture.

Daniel spent the last twenty-five years successfully building consulting practices in the financial services, telecommunications, and public services sectors, employing his entrepreneurial approach to strategy.

With the explosion of data and hyperconnectivity, Daniel's curiosity led him to research how leaders responded to the onslaught of available data and to publish his first book, Consider: Harnessing the Power of Reflective Thinking in Your Organization. Consider centers around the role reflection can play in dramatically improving corporate outcomes. In Consider, Daniel distilled lessons in leadership and habits of reflective thinking that made the difference between success and failure during the recent financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in recovering from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It has been celebrated as a top nonfiction leadership book impacting the lives and work habits of small and large organizations from around the world.

Daniel's expertise in organizational behavior change, culture measurement, management, and strategy led him to found THRUUE. Today, Daniel works with CEOs, boards of directors, and C-suite leaders across the country, helping them align around clear strategies while understanding reputational and cultural risk. He implements methodologies to quantify culture and integrate it into each organization's mission, vision, core values, and behaviors so that the company achieves its strategic priorities.

Daniel's collaboration with Jerry Zimmerman began in the fall of 1997 when Daniel entered the MBA program at the University of Rochester's Simon School of Business where took courses from Jerold Zimmerman. Decades later, Forrester reached out to Zimmerman for some expert feedback on a challenging consulting case. Zimmerman helped Daniel reformulate the problem from multiple dimensions. At the end of the call, Zimmerman mentioned a manuscript that he was working on that explored a unique set of atypical organizations that would outlast Goldman Sachs and Google. Forrester was immediately interested. After reading early chapters of what became "Relentless," the two went back and forth on emails and phone calls for the better part of a year. Much of the book's content on culture is the direct result of Daniel's expertise and practical experience in helping clients understand and improve their corporate culture.

Daniel is married with two children. He is now working on his first screen play.