Mark Twain once said, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.“ Even the strongest relationships have conflict, and sometimes negotiation has conflict. But why not laugh when it happens? This is the question that Christine McKay explores with Chris Tabish, author of Comediology and CEO of The Comediology Company. Chris talks about the magic that laughter can bring and how it can be a useful tool for mitigating conflict. He also shares his thoughts on how comedy serves as a critical element in successful relationships and negotiations.
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Comedy In Negotiation With Chris Tabish
We are very excited to have you joining us. We here are really focused on helping you, a small business owner and entrepreneur, figure out how to ask for more of what you want and provide you with some of the tools and techniques to help you negotiate for it. I am excited to have a friend and former colleague. We worked together many years ago in a very traumatic experience, I have to say. I think it forged a little bit of where we have found ourselves now. Out of trauma, comes great things.
Chris Tabish is here with us. He is not only a long time professional in Silicon Valley working with a lot of massive technology companies, he is also an active stand-up comedian. He is the author of the book Comediology, which is all about how to be more effective and fulfilled in business by using comedy. Chris is the Cofounder of Venture West Consulting in Silicon Valley. Their mission at Venture West is to help organizations create meaningful strategies and bring them to reality. Venture West has worked with and helped many Fortune 500 companies like Kaiser Permanente, Cisco Systems, Veritas Software, Peet’s Coffee, Brown & Toland, Petco, Juniper Networks and that’s a few of them. He has been in the industry for a long time.
Chris, I am so excited to have you. I’m glad we reconnected. I loved working with you all those years ago and I’m excited to see where you have taken your career. I know that when we first started working together, you were getting into comedy or had been in it. To see where you’ve taken that part of your career and how it’s influenced your consulting side, especially working with the technology space is really awesome. Tell us more about how you ended up on that journey.
Christine, thank you for accepting the bribe having me on the show. I appreciate that. Let’s be real. You were the only one working six years ago. I was trying to stay out of your way. I had been doing comedy for a few years. I was coming out of the comedy closet. You were really gentle with me and thank you for that. It has had more of an influence and even the things that we talked about, especially negotiation and what’s super important is I’ve found that comedy was helping me in business, in addition to finding joy and building relationships. On the conversations we’ve had about how this can influence and be a north star in terms of helping negotiation, which you wouldn’t think so intuitively or left brain but I think there’s a world out there that we’re going to co-create and I’m excited about it.
One of the things that you are very good at and we have a good mutual friend Scott Powell. He and I talk about you. You’re really good at building relationships and I think that your background in comedy, your love of comedy and how you don’t take yourself so seriously. How you can make fun of the situation, yourself and yet no other people, it’s not about being sarcastic, mean, rude or anything like that. It’s about finding joy in things that you use to create relationships. As you know and as many of our audience know, in my view of negotiation is that negotiation is nothing more than a conversation about a relationship and there’s no win in relationship. Relationship is something we work on together all the time.
You are happily married with three beautiful kids. I’m happily married with three amazing kids. I always say that the negotiation, the contract that my husband and I entered into many years ago is not entirely the same contract we have now because we’re not the same people. The thing with that is that comedy helped us get through a lot of things. Our ability to laugh together has strengthened our relationship. Tell us about how you see comedy playing in some of the examples that you’ve seen in your career of late and how comedy has helped. I know you’ve got some big presentations coming up with some big companies and teaching them. Big companies are hiring Chris to come and teach them how to use comedy effectively in their organizations.
Thank you, Christine. First off, how could you take this seriously? Look what I got to work with. I think there is so much to have a personal relationship that’s based on laughter. They did a study where they put people on a video box and, “Ray, we’re going to put you in a box for a couple of hours. It’s an experiment. Trust me.” These guys were watching videos. Some clips were funny and some weren’t so funny and they would randomly patch in other people who are watching the videos with them. At the end of the video watching, they would say, “Were you able to breathe in there okay?” The second they were like, “What did you think of that? Which people did you like the best who were watching the video?” Hands down, they wanted to be associated. They saw things the same way. They wanted to spend more time with the people that were laughing with them. It turns out they weren’t even real people. They were like the Max Headroom.
They were video patched through these recordings of people but that’s how powerful comedy is. How easy it is to negotiate a peanut butter sandwich from your mom like, “Mom, I need a peanut butter sandwich.” It’s because you have a relationship built on trust. He’s a schlep and useless but they know you and they make up for that any down like slacker or whatever you have going on with you. You don’t need to put on any facade. If you build that, people will give you the benefit of the doubt and people will go out of their way to help you be successful.
I was talking about this with somebody. I said, “I can be in a situation and not like what somebody has done.” I have a situation where somebody has not been doing something that I’ve wanted them to do and that I’m paying them to do. It doesn’t change how I feel about this person because I love this person, I have respect for this person, this person is an amazing contributor to my team and I know that this person is going through something. It’s like, “This person’s going through something right now and I’m going to give them some latitude.” Whereas if I didn’t have that and I hadn’t laughed and cried with this person, then I wouldn’t be as okay giving them latitude. I might sever that relationship.
Your ability to have that real deep connection is important. I want to get your thoughts on this because I get a little bit on my high horse over this whole concept. This KLT bullshit, Know, Like and Trust. Everyone’s going to know, like and trust you. I don’t personally buy that way. I don’t really need to know you because I can make a decision pretty fast. I need to know that what you have is going to resonate with me, that I have a need for it and that’s going to deliver results. I buy lots of stuff from people that I cannot stand. People are like, “How do you do that?” I’m like, “I don’t know. What they’re delivering matters to me.”
Case on point, I’m on the shell.
There is that. That’s comedy because many people are talking about this KLT factor. It’s very simplistic and not entirely accurate way but on the other hand, I think comedy actually though because for people who do buy based on KLT, if you’re somebody where that matters. Talk about how comedy can expand that and influence that for those people who buy that way.
We talked a little bit about this. I wouldn’t necessarily know, like and trust. I feel like comedy is a negotiation. When I’m up on stage, one of the things is I have to demonstrate that I’m human, that there is a connection between me and you and there’s an open energy about me. It isn’t necessarily something you need to trust all my values and judgment, but there’s a way that you can get in there and engage. You do that by self-deprecation. You do that by telling stories that you can relate to. That person gets in there and says, “There’s some energy I can engage with.” It’s almost like an empathetic energy.
I’m not trying to sound like a guru on a hill but I can have fun. I can play. It’s not this hard and fast rule teacher that, “This is the way it must be done.” There’s no way for me to engage there. There’s no way for me to come in and play there. I think a big part of it is making that platform. The first thing I do when I get up on stage is I say, “I want to connect with people and I want to enjoy my time with them,” and that’s it. It’s not, “What am I going to say? What joke am I going to have? How am I going to structure it?” I used to do that and I’ve learned from that the meaning of failure, having an open basis that you can give people an opportunity to engage.
The other side of the transaction is when you talk about trust, I don’t necessarily think it’s the message of trust that you’re going to like what I say and that’s the difference. The message of trust that it’s coming from an authentic place. If you can trust that it’s authentic and that I’m not getting sugarcoated, I’m not calling you sports. This is what’s inside of me and you can connect with that. It’s that bond that’s built. I agree. I would describe it a little bit differently as well and you’re spot on. It’s almost like an open energy, one that is not taken too seriously that you can play.
When you have a relationship with people built on trust, they will give you the benefit of the doubt and go out of their way to help you succeed. Share on XWe were talking about my VennMasters Program, which we’re getting ready to launch, which I want to include a segment on that with respect to comedy because comedy is a negotiation. When you’re on stage, who’s the most important part of that interaction, you or the audience? It’s the audience.
Building a relationship with the audience.
The thing with negotiation is how many times have you, have I, we walked into a negotiation and we think we know what we want, how important those things are and we have no clue about the other guy. We have not spent a nanosecond of time trying to figure out what’s important to my counterpart. How do I make my counterpart successful? As a comedian, you’re focusing on how do I make sure my audience has this awesome experience where they’re laughing? They laugh hard, they cry. Their stomachs or their side hurts. How do I engage with them? In negotiation, so often people don’t think about that. They get myopically focused on what it is that they want, that they don’t pay attention to their counterpart. Tell me about a time when you did not negotiate effectively with your audience and it was a complete disaster.
I would say my first thousand times on stage. Christine, I love where you’re going and I love the analogy. In comedy, you’re drawn to that field because you love to make people laugh and you love that reaction. It’s such a high, better than any drug, at least the ones that I’ve tried. You then need to learn this craft. This craft is so much about rules, the power of three. It’s about breaking assumptions, having many minutes and many laughs per minute. You get caught up in the mechanics. It’s a mental arm wrestle. When the first times you’re going up on stage, you think, “I need to remember my lines. I need to remember the power of three. I need to look here.” You’re consumed in what you want, analogous to a contract negotiation. You completely forget people are there and it falls flat. Sometimes I think stand-up comedy, the first thousand times, is all about failing in front of people and I’ve gotten super good at that.
You wake up and you’re like, “Wait a second.” I’m like, “I’m going to bring the joy.” That’s all. I didn’t memorize and I didn’t go through the mechanics before I got on stage. As I said, “I’m going to connect with people and find joy.” I got up there and I did. I completely muffed up the lines and I’m like, “I think I completely muffed up the lines.” There was such a profound sense of joy and people connecting with me that I’m like, “This is the magic of comedy. This is where we really have a relationship. They’re with me and they want me to succeed. I love them and they love me back. It’s not about the material. It is about the relationship.” The same thing I think what you’re saying from a contractual negotiation perspective, it’s about the relationship because what is a contract? It’s the representation of that relationship.
My lawyer friends always laugh at me because they’re like, “Christine, and I apologize to my girlfriend whose name is in fact, Pollyanna.”
It’s better than Karen.
Attorneys go, “That’s such a Pollyanna view.” I’m like, “If you knew my girlfriend, Pollyanna, you would not be saying that because she is badass.” A contract is a hopeful document. It is entered into based on the hope of a better future, either together or apart, depending on whether it’s a contract to separate something. It’s a document that’s based on the hope of something better to come. People don’t think of contracts that way. What lawyer would sit and say, “A contract is a hopeful document.”
“Christine, you are out of your damn mind,” and I am probably out of my damn mind but that’s the thing though that it is a representation of a relationship. You enter into a relationship because you have an expectation that you are going to be better off and therefore your counterpart will be better off together, however this relationship is defined, which is what you’re talking about with respect to comedy. What I hear you saying is there’s a freedom at that moment when you went, “I’m going to engage and I’m going to bring joy,” and you didn’t go through what the three rules were and all that. There was a freedom in that and letting that go.
Talk a little bit more about what that freedom has allowed you. I do believe that this has a strong correlation to negotiation because when we go into a negotiation, we are so fixated and 55% of negotiators are what we call Maverick negotiators. They have a checklist and they go down that checklist and they get 0.1, they get 0.2. They don’t get 0.3 and they get pissed off about it. They get 0.4, they get 0.5. They get all but points 3 and 9 and they go, “I’m really ticked off that I didn’t get 3 and 9 but I got an 80% on my quiz.” They’ve lost the freedom of what it would be to explore that relationship without the checklist and find more value as a result of that checklist. How has that freedom opened up your ability to find value in that relationship with your audience?
I will answer that but can you tell me, am I getting a B plus so far?
When you get out of your mind, you go to heights that you never thought possible. Share on XI don’t know. We’re still maybe at a C level at this point. The audience in YouTube and all that, “Tell Chris what you’re giving him as a grade.”
I think what you said was brilliant. I’m not even sure you meant to say it but you were off the cuff. You are the Christ-child of contracts, Christine, so it’s meant to come out. You said maybe I’m out of my mind and that is spot on. That is 1,000% correct. Here’s what happens with comedy and I’ll use the example of going into a meeting but it’s the same thing that applies in a contractual meeting. You go in. It’s in the morning. You’re halfway through your Starbucks or Peet’s and you’re like, “Bob’s a jerk. What are you looking at, Melinda?” You’re getting your stuff together then all of a sudden, somebody says something and it makes you laugh, it makes you giggle.
In that moment, you’re transforming from your mind to, “What are we going to talk about? How’s it going to impact me? Am I going to get an 80%?” All of a sudden, you move your body because you laughed. You’re out of your mind. All of a sudden, you feel lighter and you feel like your soul has another place to live than in your cerebral cortex. You’re like, “Go give me a hug.” It changes your perspective. It changes how you engage. There’s so much intelligence in our bodies if we give it a chance. Your mind couldn’t keep you alive for ten seconds, pulse rate, blood flow, lung capacity and all the stuff that your body knows how to do. Your body, if you let it, knows how to build a relationship, speak, engage and be authentic. From that, you’re right. It reaches far greater heights than only your mind could do. I agree with you. Get out of your mind and go to heights that you never thought possible.
What I wanted to say, I think that you get out of your mind. The thing that’s amazing about laughter is that not only do you forget your mind, you forget your entire self. Laughing is something that you cannot do without abandoning. There is a surrender that comes from laughter. The thing is that in business, you’ve seen me negotiate contracts. You’ve been around when I’ve been doing that. I do try to lighten things. People get so serious and intense about it. People are like, “I’ve got to win or I hate losing more than I even like winning, more than I love winning.” I’m like, “What the hell does that mean?” It’s like, “I’ve got to conquer these guys. I’ve got to know that I walked away with the best possible deal. These guys didn’t get anything and that I got everything.” It’s created this psychology around negotiation, this fear around negotiation when in fact like I would suggest that we have been laughing since we were babies and would lose ourselves in abandon.
There’s nothing that makes me laugh harder than watching a little baby who has no ability to use words yet, laugh randomly, belly laugh for no apparent reason. I’ve got a YouTube video going through my head and it’s already making me laugh, yet we don’t allow ourselves to do that in business, especially in United States, which obviously where we are at. It’s quite sad that a lot of US business cultures are permeating other parts of the world now. I’ve done a lot of work in Southeast Asia and they don’t laugh very much in business meetings at all. If we could bring that laughter that we had from when we were kids because we learned how to negotiate when we’re kids. Seven-year-olds are the best damn negotiators on the planet and they’re good.
It’s always interesting when I say this and adults say, “Seven-year-olds are great at manipulating.” I’m like, “No, they’re not great at manipulating. They’re great in influencing you. They’re great at negotiating with you. They understand you. They’ve learned who you are as mom. Me as mom, they learned who my husband was, as dad. They learned how to talk to their grandparents. They learned how to talk to the family friend. They learned how to talk to each of their teachers. They saw that and they adjusted. They were good at making those adjustments like they’re good at laughing at the stupid nonsensical things in life and finding joy in the mundane almost.”
As we got older, we’ve forgotten how to laugh and we’ve also forgotten how to negotiate in many cases. These things that we’ve done that we started out doing when we’re a kid. People say to me, “I’m a terrible negotiator. I was never a good negotiator.” I’m like, “You’re full of crap. There was a time in your life when you were really good at it.” What do you say to adults who are like, “Comedy doesn’t belong in business. It’s a serious thing and you keep score by dollars?” How do you react to that?
I think a couple of things you said really resonated with me, in particular seven-year-olds, because they’re good. Comedy is another word in my mind for truth. The reason that comedy resonates with us is that it’s true. Seven-year-olds are good at negotiation, to your point. They’re also good at comedy. For example, when my son was seven, we’re hanging out. The whole family is over in the house. We were on a houseboat. Everybody sees the deck and you can see everything. There was a trashcan and there was a big toilet paper with poopy on it. I’m like, “Are you wiping and then putting it in the trashcan?” He looks at me. The whole family is around, Christine. He looks at me and he goes, “Don’t blame me. I don’t even use toilet paper.” “Have you gone digital?”
The thing is it was totally a true statement. My family is like, “Great, son-in-law. Nice to see you raising such a successful family.” He doesn’t care. It is the truth. We love it. We respect it. We react to it. We laugh at it. A lot of people say, like you, “I’m not a good negotiator.” They say, “I could never be a comedian.” I’m like, “Here’s an exercise. Listen, observe, speak truth and watch what happens.” This is for your audience because I think it’s the same thing in negotiation if something is up. It comes up, you speak it. It’s true. Christine, I’m looking at your Venn negotiation in the back and I always wondered why Venn needs two Ns.
It’s the guy’s name. You suck at Math, right?
Right. To steal a joke that I’ve heard before. We’d pronounce it’s as something like Ven. You can’t help but observing, speaking and it’s coming out as funny or getting to the truth of what you want but people are caught up in the next step and the next thing, to slow down, observe and speak the truth. My guess is it would be as impactful in negotiation as it is in comedy.
It would be. I talk a lot about my view of listening. It is a full contact and full body activity. If all you do is try to listen with your ears, you’re missing 55% of communication, which is non-verbal. You have to listen with your eyes. You have to listen with your touch and how somebody shakes your hand. That initial interaction matters. You have to listen with their sense of smell. What does somebody wearing or not wearing perfume or cologne say about a person? What is that person communicating? What they wear, the style of clothing, the colors of the clothing.
Obviously for me, somebody looks at me and goes, “Why in the hell did she dye her hair funky weird colors?” It’s like, “What does that say about it?” That’s all communication. What you’re talking about to me is the power of observation, the power of listening and how you take that and you use that to inform essentially a hypothesis about your counterpart, about the other side of the table. You then spend your time, “Was my hypothesis correct? Where did I screw up? Where did I make a misjudgment or a misassessment?” That’s part of where that dialogue comes in.
You put it so well about listening with your full body and that applies to the other party. It also applies to our self. One of the things that we suppress is like, “I don’t really want more money. I want to work a lot of hours. I’ll take the job.” It’s like, “No, you’re not listening to yourself.” One of the things I love about comedy is that if I tell you a joke, you are going to think that it’s funny or it’s not but you don’t need to look up Gartner. You don’t need to go to the industry reports. You don’t need to say, “Boss, was that a funny joke?” No. It’s either funny or it’s not to you. The only way you can know that is getting in touch with yourself and slowly.
This going to sound funny but this was the journey for me in comedy is realizing that I have a voice, I have a predilection and I have things that are important to me that I need to get out on the table. I can’t hold my breath in the outhouse for another twenty years from our last company. I need to get out because this sucks. That’s respecting that and listening to that, as well as listening to other others and coming to that agreement. You can’t go wrong.
I often tell people that the hardest part of every negotiation is the negotiation we have between our ears, the stories that we tell ourselves, the lies that we tell ourselves. Our brain does that as a way of trying to protect us. It wants everything to stay nice and exactly where it is because it’s cozy, warm, and you are not dying where you’re at. If you’re not dying and I’m not having to protect you, I don’t want you to change anything. We tell ourselves. I tell a story about how I bought two cars for the price of one plus $5,000. I went to a car dealership and it was like, “I want to buy two cars. I’m only going to pay for one of them, but I want to drive off the lot with two.” If I had told anybody that I was going to do that, people would have been, “You can do that.”
I had researched the hell out of the car, the market and the dealerships. I understood how they made money. I understood how they sold. I understood the probability of selling that particular car and what the cost of holding was. I had this hypothesis about what this car buying situation was. Having that and being able to have that hypothesis to test made a difference. I didn’t go in negotiating against myself before I’d ever tested with the person, I needed to negotiate with whether or not it was possible. I said, “Based on my research, I think this is doable.” I was wrong on my inventory holding costs and so I increased my offer by $5,000 but an hour and a half of research saved me $23,000.
My husband did this. He changed jobs this summer. He had taken a job a decade ago when the economy was not in a good place. He’d been unemployed for a number of months. He was freaking out but he got a job offer with his dream company. He was willing to take a massive haircut in salary which he never made up over ten years and it ate at him. It bothered him but it was a monumental increase. He took a $60,000 pay cut and he never made it up. When he decided to start looking for a new job, he’s like, “This is a salary bump but no one’s going to pay me that. It’s too big.” I was like, “As long as you keep telling yourself that, you’re negotiating against yourself already. Stop doing that. Put it out there. Say what you want and go.” He got the salary he wanted. He got 25% salary increase during COVID. That negotiation that we have with ourselves and I love what you’re saying that comedy and the conversation we have with ourselves and whether we’re willing to laugh with our self is part of that contract to be successful and move forward.
We negotiate with ourselves and cut ourselves short. The same thing happens in comedy and what translates to business. One of the things that I’ve learned is the same thing that you have put in a joke, as it does in a statement of what you want and to embrace the moment of a pause and silence. When I start off comedy, I would say a joke and I would be like, “Blah, blah, blah.” I was so like, “Is this going to hit? I better be onto the next thing before people realize I’m not funny.” Now it’s like, “That’s the joke.” You’ve got to sit there and you’re like, “That didn’t work out.”
I know this is going to sound funny but you fall in love with that moment. If you think about it, you’re in love, you don’t hurry things up. “First, I want to kiss your nose then I want to get on with it.” No, you want to, “First, I want to kiss your nose.” You want to take every moment and you want to stretch that moment out. You fall completely in love with that moment. The same thing is on stage. It’s the same thing when you’re asking for a raise, “This is what I want.” You fall in love and hopefully, they’ll love you back. If not, it’s a joyful moment anyway. You find joy in it. You go onto the next one and you raise $5,000 but that’s the magic if we let ourselves have that magic. We laugh when we don’t give ourselves a chance. It’s silence.
We so often don’t. I do an exercise. I can’t remember if I did it when we were working together and we had a group event or not, but I do an exercise when I have a group of people together. It’s about getting comfortable with silence. I’ll have 5 or 6 people and I’ll have somebody ask a question. The person who asks a question cannot say anything for 30 seconds. Invariably, somebody dives into the question but also equally as invariably, there’s one person who waits until the 20 or 25-second mark before he or she starts to speak at all. By this time, many people are leaned across the table. They’re mouthing words in anticipation. They are fidgeting. They are jumping out of their skins because they think 30 seconds is a really long time.
A number of times I’ve been on negotiation calls or in meetings, especially a call, when somebody will say something and I say nothing. They’ll wait and they’ll stop talking too because they know this silence thing too. I know they’re waiting for me to dive in and I don’t do that. They’ll say, “Are you still there?” I’m like, “Yeah, I’m listening.” They dive back in because the power of that silent moment is incredible, that pregnant pause. There’s so much that you can learn about the situation, about your counterpart and about yourself in those moments of silence. If we’re constantly trying to fill in the airspace, we learn nothing. All we know is what we think we know.
One of the things that I’ve learned from negotiation and comedy is with negotiation, you ask an open-ended question. Our tendency is to negotiate with ourselves. The audience will make up their own story. The analogous thing I think in a contract is how can I do that and then let them negotiate it out. I guess you can. I better give you what you want. It’s the same thing in comedy. There’s a joke that I’ve told where the question actually hits bigger than the punchline.
The joke goes, I visited an Airbnb during COVID. I was worried about COVID and so I said, “I’m worried about COVID.” He’s like, “Don’t worry. Now during COVID, we do a deep cleaning.” I’m like, “What’d you do before?” He’s like, “Not a deep cleaning.” I tell that question because the audience is then, “What the hell did they do before?” They’re like, “Have I been sleeping in this?” The punchline hits most of the time but not as big as the question. You use that to your advantage the same way in negotiation. Let them negotiate with themselves. They’re good at it.
Listen, observe, speak the truth, and watch what happens. Share on XChris, this has been amazing. I know you have a hard stop in a few minutes. How can people find your book? How can they find you? If you guys buy Chris’ book Comediology, I know it’s on Amazon.
Thank you, Christine. Comediology is on Amazon. It is on Audible. You can reach me at Comediology.com. I’d love to hear from folks. Give me a shout. I love to engage. I’m responsive, except when I’m sleeping, but other than that, call me. I’d love to virtually hang out.
Thank you, Chris. What kind of parting comments do you want to leave with our guests?
Christine, I had such a joy with you. This has been so much fun. Thank you for having me on the show. You clearly are the contractual guru. I’m grateful to have spent time with you and had a laugh.
Thank you. You are amazing. I love you. I’m glad that we got this to work. I’m excited because I’ve got some things burning with some of my programs. Chris, I see us having some work together in the future because I think comedy is a great way to help entrepreneurs and small business owners embrace a topic that they are not quite comfortable with. I also want to thank every one of our audience. Thank you so much for honoring us with your time. I hope you have found this to be as fun and enjoyable as I have because I’ve laughed really hard. I look forward to seeing you all again on our next episode. Negotiation is nothing more than a conversation about a relationship and there is no win in relationship. Go make great relationships. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day. Cheers.
Important Links:
- Comediology
- Venture West Consulting
- VennMasters Program
- Amazon – Comediology: Be More Effective and Fulfilled in Business With Comedy
- Audible – Comediology: Be More Effective and Fulfilled in Business With Comedy
- https://Comediology.com
About Chris Tabish
Chris Tabish, Chief Comediology Evangelist
Forever an optimist in the power of good in people and the idea that work should be fun and fulfilling. My aspiration is to shift the paradigm to help professionals accomplish meaningful work and find joy in the process. My energy comes from connecting with people and helping them transform from tactical to strategic, frustration to fulfillment and resistance to levity and joy. I believe you can only influence true change from the inside and that this transformation can and should be fun.
Chris is a passionate, transformational growth leader with over 20 years of experience successfully leading and delivering all aspects of complex implementations at the Fortune 500 Level including strategy, program management, technology, change leadership and process improvement.
Specialties include: Program “turnarounds”, Program and change leadership for large-scale process and technology implementations, Defining and aligning executive stakeholders to a common vision and leading large, distributed teams to a common, meaningful goal. Chris is a published author of the book Comediology, Be More Effective and Fulfilled in Business With Comedy and a public speaker.