Thank you for responding to my call for help for the outreach for the Visionary Business Conference in February www.speakerservices.com/visionarybiz. The buzz is on!

As is customary I set up 3 complimentary teleclasses before the conference so that you can get a taste of some of our faculty. The first teleclass is Nov 2 with Linda Landon and Jamie Walters (see details and register: http://www.speakerservices.com/teleclasses/detail/66) who will be discussing their areas of expertise: The Four Agreements at Work, Authentic Marketing and Visionary Leadership. It's a departure from speaking and the media conferences that I produce. I want you to know that the information you will receive from this conference sets the foundation for anyone who is in business.

Some of the highlights of the Conference are: VisionBuilding, Saying Yes In the Land of No, Upside Thinking and Creativity in the Workplace with Jack Barnard. We're kicking it up a notch on the creativity and fun end - you could participate in creating a performance piece which will be delivered to the attendees on the last day. I have set aside 2 hours on the first 2 days in the afternoon for Open Space. You will have an opportunity to sit in circles and get up close and personal with our faculty and or any experts who are in attendance who are drawn to facilitate a circle. Not to mention the opportunity to have both lunch or dinner with the team. This was one of the highlights of our MediaSpeak Symposium which rated quite high. Check the program out at www.speakerservices.com/visionarybiz

I have included an article The Rise of the "Grace-full" Business by Jamie S. Walters and Tips for Preventing and Resolving Conflict from Stewart Levine. Both of them are on the agenda for the Visionary Business Conference: Creating Business from the Inside Out.

Regards,
Susan Levin
Speaker Services
310-822-4922 PST

New & Renewing Speakers & Authors November '06
See all speakers: http://speakerservices.com

Michelle Armstrong, Author
Author of Manage Your Mind, Master Your Life teaches business professionals how to create wealth, purpose and passion - and have all the time in the world to enjoy it!
Inspirational, Law of Attraction, Motivational Empowerment, Personal Development
http://www.speakerservices.com/speakers/detail/261

Vanessa Besack
PR expert shows how to get your message across to a vast audience - on a shoestring budget.
Branding, Business Building, Marketing, Public Relations
http://speakerservices.com/speakers/detail/169

Deborah Carabet
Gourmet chef-nutrition counselor, who counseled victims, trained volunteers and brought healthy meals to Ground Zero, shows how simple it is to eat great-tasting, fresh food anytime - no matter what your dietary requirements are.
Health, Nutrition, Cooking, Lifestyles
http://www.speakerservices.com/speakers/detail/259

Teri R. Fisher
Business leader reveals secrets of Succession Planning, growing internal leadership and the importance of spending less time on tactics, more on vision and employee development.
Management, Motivational, Succession Planning
http://www.speakerservices.com/speakers/detail/34

Linda Lindemann
Identity theft consultant reveals latest scams and offers 14 simple ways to protect yourself now from this growing threat.
Topics: Asset Protection, Crime Prevention, Identity Theft
http://www.speakerservices.com/speakers/detail/217

Ann O'Brien, Author
Intuitive healer and consultant shows how to create the relationships, well-being and success you dream of by awakening your natural intuitive power and using it - instead of letting it use you.
Intuition, Law of Attraction, Personal Development, Success
http://www.speakerservices.com/speakers/detail/258

Laura Piening
Organizational specialist shows how to harness the energetic forces of attitude and belief to help individuals shine and businesses soar.
Intuition, Organizational Development, Positive Work Environments
http://www.speakerservices.com/speakers/detail/257

Alan Stafford, Author
Success expert and business coach shares proven strategies and insights on team leadership, customer service, and how to get the results you want for both your company and your personal life.
Customer Service, Leadership, Success
http://www.speakerservices.com/speakers/detail/256

Linda Sivertsen, Author
Celebrity journalist shows how to get your foot in the door and "rub elbows" with Powerful People to enhance your career, make things happen, and become personally empowered to make this planet a better place.
Business Spirituality, Marketing, Opening Doors, Success
http://www.speakerservices.com/speakers/detail/260

Blair Tindall, Author
Author, performer and musician Blair Tindall inspires diverse audiences to find their mission and reach their goals through her tale of creative career change.
Business Building, Career, Creativity
http://www.speakerservices.com/speakers/detail/254 _________________________________

Tips & Advice

Send your tips and advice to tips@speakerservices.com

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_________________________________________

ARTICLE: The Rise of the "Grace-full" Business
by Jamie S. Walters

There's a sea-change underway in business, though it's just starting to be visible "around the edges" of the mainstream business culture. What's really beginning to occur is a move towards greater balance, suggesting that what has passed for "normal" has actually been discernibly out of balance.

But what is this shift, and towards what? The shift is towards a more graceful way of being and doing business, and away from a rather graceless and very costly approach.

Throughout the industrial and technology ages -- over the course of the last 125 years or so -- there has been a move towards increasing mechanization and away from humanization, towards categorization and away from organic. This trend was actually seeded much earlier, when so-called "rational", linear thinking came to dominate over (and often overtly delegitimize) more fluid, intuitive, natural and seemingly chaotic ways.

The relevance and practicality of Grace

So what does this have to do with business in the here-and-now? Everything. Does this have any link to the sea-change underway? Yes.

While the hyper-rational, industrial and high-tech era produced a good deal of technological progress--medicines, communications, sanitation--the predominance of it also helped to disconnect us from the intangible, unseen and truly "civilizing" world often associated with the Feminine and Spirit.

This disconnection created an imbalance that fueled a greater propensity towards incivility, violence, cruelty, dehumanizing or degrading behavior, the despoiling or selfish exploitation of beings and shared resources, etc. All you have to do is read the newspapers--or watch the documentary, The Corporation--to see that the truth of this is easily and readily proven.

In the world of business, this disconnection or imbalance was evidenced by a Machiavellian "ends justify the means" philosophy, where the intentions and actions of the individual or the enterprise were disconnected from their broader and longer-term impact or consequences. While the Enrons of the world are the more recent example of this, the so-called "robber barons" of the earlier industrial era were also poster-boys of imbalance. The seeds of the "psychopath Corporation" and the dissociative leader were planted before Enron was founded.

Wisdom traditions tell us that "by our works we are known"--another way of saying, "Actions speak more loudly than our words." The "works" stemming from a disconnect between work and heart, action and impact, ability and ethics told a good many of us that the imbalance needs to be addressed because it's not sustainable and it's downright harmful not just to human beings but to the entire Creation that sustains and includes us.

We know this. So the seeds of change have been planted, towards a more graceful--grace-full--norm.

What is the grace-full business?

Some would ask whether "grace" has any place in business. For the old-school and unsustainable model that has predominated in the business world for the last era, the answer would be "no." Such an attitude is what allowed for and created the "psychopath corporation."

A focus on grace, decency, and humaneness is hardly a "new age" issue, though. For example, B.C. Forbes founded Forbes Magazine in 1917 to help inspire greater humaneness in business, Cadbury and Clarke's are two companies founded and run according to Quaker principles, and many other wisdom traditions have "right livelihood" and other references to ethical, positive-impact enterprise.

For those who are planting the seeds and ushering in a more sustainable, balanced, healthy way of doing business, the answer is most definitely "yes"-grace can be and is the very center of sustainable business that has both individual and community benefit at heart.

A grace-full business operates from such a heart-center, reclaiming the Feminine way of seeing and operating in seeming chaos, of synthesizing and seeing patterns, of allowing the unordered space from which creativity emerges, of associating actions with impact, of nurturing the wellbeing of the whole, as well as maintaining a balanced focus on the traditionally Masculine disciplines of specialization, ordering, engineering, mechanizing, and pursuing traditional "bottom line" return. Both of these are necessary for the grace-full--or even most effective--enterprise; the problem is that the Feminine was marginalized and rejected altogether, resulting in outcomes that ultimately created neither sustainable nor positive net-impact enterprises.

From this graceful balance between linear and organic, ordered and chaotic, comes an enterprise that is heart-literate, ethical, vision-propelled, authentic, conscious, connected, and perhaps more effective in the contemporary world.

Jamie S. Walters is founder and chief vision & strategy officer at Ivy Sea, Inc., and publisher and editor-in-chief for Ivy Sea Online, recognized by Inc.com, Harvard Business School, The CEO Refresher and other business portals as one of the best sites on the internet for entrepreneurs, small-business owners and organizational leaders. E-mail Jamie directly at jwalters@ivysea.com