The Game Changer Network

Every business is a system – Simple_Complexity reveals the structure and dynamics of the system so you can excel at managing it.

Every manager knows a business is a system, yet very few have studied systems thinking or system dynamics. This is a critical oversight, one which Simple_Complexity remedies. Simple_Complexity reveals the fundamental system archetype at work in your enterprise and prescribes new and exciting ways to re-invigorate your management thinking. Picking up where the greats in management thought leave off, Simple_Complexity provide a systems context that powerfully enriches traditional management thought and practice.

Dr. William (Willy) Donaldson is a Entrepreneur, Beloved Professor, Systems Thinker, Professor of Management at the Joseph W. Luter, III School of Business at Christopher Newport University.

Willy has over 30 years of experience as a Board member and President and has been CEO of 8 companies including a publicly traded company and an international joint-venture. Willy is the Founder and President of Strategic Venture Planning, a management consulting firm that assists boards, investors and senior management teams maximize results. His experience runs from start-up to International 50 companies, private and public companies, from services to manufacturing, from low to high tech and from for profit to not for profit. He is a member of the International Council on Systems Engineering, where he chairs the Enterprise Systems working group world-wide.

He recently just received a professor position with UVA.

Mom Boss ― Super Mom, Great Business Woman Entrepreneurial Mom: Learn how to be a super mom and a great business woman in a step-by-step guide to developing, incubating, and marketing your business without taking the joy out of family life with kids―being an active parent while being an active business entrepreneur. Badass Business Woman: Where Sophia Amoruso’s #GirlBoss left off for young millennials breaking into the business world, Mom Boss picks up and continues the mission for all the entrepreneurial moms out there. Mom Boss proves that being successful isn’t about degrees or sacrifices, it’s about balance and power. It’s where instinct meets intelligence. Every mom has it in her to be a badass business woman. Nicole Feliciano charts the course for building a successful career without sacrificing being a great mom.

MomBoss is the first book by Nicole Feliciano the Founder & CEO of Momtrends Media. Momtrends Media provides busy women with a daily dose of style. Each day Nicole and her team of editors, interpret trends for moms, keeping in mind that modern women want to look and feel great, but they are working with less time and less energy than they had before the kids came along.

Nicole and her team are there to help and inspire women to look and feel their best. Social media is her playground, and she’s built a loyal following by making fashion fun and accessible.

Mom Boss includes: • tips on how to develop, incubate, and market your business without taking the joy out of family life • valuable self assessment exercises • step by step advise, inspiration, and tried and true business and personal tips • insights into how to be a successful and happy business woman and mom.


Before launching Momtrends, Nicole graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in English Literature, and spent a decade working in fashion–most notably as an executive with Polo Ralph Lauren. When she became a mom in 2005, the fashion maven embarked on her social media career and began contributing to Babble.com, Time Out New York Kids, and many more online publications. Seeing a void in the blogosphere, she launched Momtrends.com in 2007. Momtrends continues to be the cornerstone of her media empire.

Every mom needs a BFF. Momtrends fits that role beautifully. Nicole Feliciano, Founder and CEO, left her role as an executive at Ralph Lauren to launch the Momtrends blog in 2007. Since then, Momtrends has grown into a boutique media brand that provides the latest news on things trendy and cool for moms. Each month more than 500,000 moms check in with us via our site, live events and social media channels looking for the scoop on what’s fresh, pretty and purposeful.

In 2014, the company purchased TheShoppingMama.com to expand the reach of the brand. TheShoppingMama focuses on kids’ fashion, food and crafting.

In addition to her online presence, Nicole has created a thriving events business that connects top-tier brands with the nation’s most influential bloggers. She’s hosted nearly 100 exclusive events from a swank product launch with Jessica Alba for the Honest Company, to glamorous fashion shows, to intimate movie previews with actresses like Julianne Moore.

Cision media place Nicole as the #11 Mom Blogger in the nation in 2014. In 2010 she was named a Top 50 Twitter Mom and included in the 50 Best Blog’s By Women. She has been featured on numerous television shows as a trend forecaster and has led more than a dozen satellite media tours.

“Most organizations direct the majority of their development resources to the C-suite, but still expect mid-level managers to attract, engage, retain, and develop talent,” say management consultants Larry Sternberg and Kim Turnage, authors of the new book MANAGING TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE: How To Engage, Retain, & Develop Talent For Maximum Performance. “Successfully juggling everyday duties while maintaining team performance and leading around roadblocks leaves little room for management planning.” The book serves as a guide to help readers grow as managers, with a series of lessons drawn from Sternberg’s own experience, as well practical exercises that put the principles into action.

In the pursuit of business goals and promotions, it’s easy for managers to lose sight of the needs of their employees. Yet managers who want to stand out from the pack would do well to focus on making a difference in the lives of the people they manage.

Larry Sternberg is a senior executive at management consulting firm Talent Plus, Inc. where he has designed and conducted training programs on a variety of topics for thousands of executives and managers.

Increasingly, identity theft is a fact of life. We might once have hoped to protect ourselves from hackers with airtight passwords and aggressive spam folders, and those are good ideas as far as they go. But the truth is, there are people out there — a lot of them — who treat stealing your identity as a full-time job.

One such company is a nameless firm located in Russia, which has a trove of over a billion internet passwords. Another set up a website full of live streams of hacked web cameras, showing everything from people’s offices and lobbies to the feeds from baby monitors. Even purchases made in person are still logged by retailers like Target, who are famously vulnerable to hackers.

Adam Levin, a longtime consumer advocate and identity fraud expert, is your guide to this brave new world. By telling memorable stories and extracting the relevant lessons, he offers a strategy for dealing with these risks.

Too many leaders fail to ask the two most important questions about their company: Who are we? And why do we matter?

Like people, companies are organisms that reflect their creators, their environments, their obstacles, and their strengths. They carry a core instruction set that informs the actions and outcomes of their work. In short, they have DNA – what Cunningham calls corporate DNA – and there are three types: Mothers (customer-oriented), Mechanics (product-oriented) and Missionaries (concept-oriented).

Using Cunningham’s DNA-based methodology, you’ll perform “genetic testing” on your company, examine the market through the six Cs of positioning, and develop your positioning statement―a rational, factual statement about your company’s unique role and relevance. Then, and only then, can you create a branding and marketing strategy that will build market momentum and crush the competition.

The lifeblood of any services business is its clients. Those who deal with clients day-to-day—the Account Leads—must keep the clients coming back for more. But clients can sometimes be difficult to please. In My Client is the Devil (And Other Myths), Drs. Steve Fedorko and Mark McKinney take a closer look at the relationship between the Account Lead and the client. What is different, and groundbreaking, about their approach is that they focus not on processes or approaches to make the client happy, but how to help the Account Lead thrive, not just survive, in this chaotic world. Using their vast experience and their backgrounds in psychology, they outline a simple path to a richer, happier, more fulfilling life at work and at home for the Account Lead, because fulfilled Account Leads result in happier clients almost every time.

The Right--and Wrong--Stuff is a candid, unvarnished guide to the bumpy road to success. The shocking truth is that 98 percent of us have at least one career-derailment risk factor, and half to two-thirds actually go off the rails. And the reason why people get fired, demoted, or plateau is because they let the wrong stuff act out, not because they lack talent, energy, experience, or credentials.

Lars Helgeson – CRM for Dummies by Chicke Fitzgerald

Anyone concerned about finances―and that’s just about everyone―will welcome this step-by-step guide to opening up about a difficult subject. It offers a strategy that can save money, improve relationships, and help people raise fiscally responsible children.

This interview with Kathleen Burns Kingsbury discusses the following:

• Discusses the societal, familial, and personal roadblocks that make talking about money and finance challenging

• Explores gender differences when it comes to talking about money and how “money silence” contributes to the wage gap for women

• Reveals the cost of living in “money silence,” including how it contributes to the high U.S. divorce rate, how it inhibits the ability of some parents to raise financially literate and responsible children, and how it stops families from successfully passing on wealth

• Identifies common money myths that fuel financial misunderstandings and mistakes, and offers tools for uncovering these fallacies

• Shows how the financial advising industry has colluded with the idea that men and women don’t need to talk about family finances as a couple—and how advisors can advocate for change

• Shares practical, easy-to-implement tips and tools for talking about money with partners, parents, siblings, children, and employers/employees

• Offers a “Money Talk Challenge” coaching exercise at the end of each chapter, with a special section on how advisors can use these tools with clients

The higher position in an organization one aspires to, the more critical soft skills of leadership and communications are to success. In a world where instant messaging, social media, and on-demand news and entertainment are stretching attention spans to the limit, the ability to communicate effectively separates those who join the executive ranks from the also-rans.

In COMMUNICATE LIKE A LEADER: Connecting Strategically To Inspire, Coach, And Get Things Done, Dianna Booher, a leading authority on leadership communication and executive presence, provides principles and techniques for communicating strategically rather than micromanaging. Strategic communication forms the core of leadership: messages, meetings, conversations, discussions, presentations and press conferences that have pivotal, long-term consequences. Every time a leader speaks, meets, negotiates, writes, or networks, he or she has the opportunity to clarify or confuse, motivate or demoralize, engage or enrage. “Strategic thinkers stand out from the crowd,” says Booher. “Big-picture thinking uniquely positions you as the resource for problem analysis and innovation.”