Now an independent researcher, author, speaker and consultant, Curt Coffman spent 22 years at The Gallup Organization and served as its Global Practice Leader for employee and customer engagement consulting. Coffman has consulted with many Fortune 100 and 500 companies, and his work has spanned the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. His mission is to help organizations understand the key characteristics of a positive, productive, customer-oriented work environment. His research and consulting insights help organizations measure and manage workplace and customer conditions that show linkage to business outcomes.

In the past 10 years, Coffman has presented to thousands of groups on the topic of creating great places to work and their impact on individuals, families, organizational growth and creating engaged customers. His research and thoughts have been published in BusinessWeek, Chief Executive magazine, CIO Magazine, The Economist, Fast Company, Fortune, the Harvard Business Review, the Harvard Management Update, Inc. magazine, the International Journal of Management Reviews, Microsoft Executive Circle, The New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Business Today (India). With John Fleming and Jim Harter, Coffman recently published an article on Gallup’s HumanSigma model — a management approach that assesses, manages, and improves the quality of the employee-customer encounter — in the Harvard Business Review (July/August, 2005).

Coffman is the coauthor of one of the best-selling management books of all time, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (Simon & Schuster, 1999). Now in its 40th printing, First, Break All the Rules has been translated into 22 languages and has appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and USA Today. Coffman is also the coauthor of Follow This Path: How the World’s Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential (Warner Books, 2002). Follow This Path has been translated into 15 languages and has appeared on several international bestseller lists.

What the World’s Greatest Managers do Differently 
Based upon interviews with over 100,000 managers, there are some things that managers do differently everyday.  Firstly, they break the rules of conventional management wisdom; they select people based upon their talents, they focus and set expectations by articulating the desired outcomes within a role, they motivate based upon helping people know their strengths and how to apply them and they develop people around who they are as individuals, know how to set themselves up for success.

Building a Great Place to Work 
What is it that determines why some teams are highly productive year after year, and others are not?  Through research with over 3 million employees 12 conditions were identified to exist within the most productive teams.  What’s good for business and what’s good for people are not separate poles anymore.  We can now identify, measure and manage to outstanding workplace conditions. 

The New Customer Strategy
For twenty years we have operated from the perspective that customers are naturally inclined to be loyal.  The latest research indicates that this is simply not true.  Customers are switchers by nature, but predisposed to have an emotional attachment to those with whom they do business with.  The role of emotional attachment as the real outcome of business is exactly what revolutionizes organizations.  Traditional customer satisfaction attempts were not only ineffective, they were based upon a flawed premise.