Success Stories
“Compression Planning has played a role quietly behind the scenes of several initiatives over almost 20 years within Luxottica Retail (we’re better known for our LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sunglass Hut, Sears Optical and Target Optical retail brands). We enlisted Jerry and his team years ago to help craft the early LensCrafters brand corporate mission, vision and core values; we’ve since used the process on multiple initiatives, from identifying streamlining opportunities to executing innovative ideas that delivered eyeglasses to more needy recipients during international optical missions. We’ve found Compression Planning very effective in taking initiatives from idea to action in a way that builds collaboration and consensus.
Luxottica Retail places heavy importance on leadership at all levels. As part of our leadership philosophy, we believe in challenging the process and enabling our associates to act. In a tough retail business climate, like other organizations we’re faced with doing more, with fewer resources, in the least possible time. Once again, we’ve enlisted McNellis for high-impact workshops to help us equip a targeted pool of associates with Compression Planning skills. In a recent workshop, about 20 participants worked on real projects with an estimated price tag of almost $50 million. These participants, many with multi-million dollar business responsibilities, have begun to report powerful productivity gains. Some are moving projects forward by two months or more by conducting a single two-hour compression planning session.
Jerry McNellis and team have truly developed a ‘thinking technology’ that has proven effective for our organization over time, and now, we’re incorporating it more than ever to empower associates, drive personal productivity, provide handrails for delivering results and developing leaders.”
Annette Brown
Professional Development Specialist
Mary Pater
Director Talent Management
Luxottica Retail
Mason, OH
“I was 28 years old (it was 1983) and asked to put together a group of experts from electric utilities to develop a national R&D plan. We hired Jerry to train our facilitators and I have been using his techniques ever since to run small, medium, and large meetings.
I believe Jerry’s teaching and concepts have not just helped me in planning meetings but also in critical and strategic thinking. People are always amazed at how much we can get done in large groups with effective planning and facilitation.”
Jonathan W. Hurwitch
Executive Vice President
Sentech, Inc.
Bethesda, MD
“I first learned about Compression Planning in the early 1980s and have been using it since. We recently trained 18 colleagues to use Compression Planning and they are using it in a variety of ways. We’ve had sessions that clarified the organization of details for our new international campus, planned a move into a new building complete with thousands of details on a very short timeline, and prioritized daily activities.”
Tom Botzman, Ph.D.
VP Business & Finance
St. Mary’s College of Maryland
St. Mary’s City, MD
“My purpose for learning the Compression Planning process was simple: an agency (National Institute of Corrections) who contracts with me uses the
Compression Planning process on a fairly routine basis.
I was thrilled as I’d been impressed by how quickly NIC staff…utilizing the Compression Planning process…were able to develop very complete plans to solve fairly complex problems in very short periods of time.
The Compression Planning training is masterfully designed. Participants bring real-world projects and apply the Compression Planning process to those ideas, projects etc. The ability to take a goal (in some cases a thought) to a sold plan in a matter of a few hours and have truly great minds (the other participants) from a broad variety of back grounds help with the planning – what a deal!
This system has been one of the most valuable tools in my tool chest.”
Winnie Ore
President
Western Training and Consulting
‘Center of the Enhancement of
Human Potential’ LLC
Helena, MT
“I used Compression Planning through-out our Lean Six Sigma implementation at Dormont Manufacturing Company.
A key to success for any Six Sigma team is creativity and getting the input of all the resources on the team. Speed also helps the process to not falter and keeps team meetings productive. These are all hallmarks of Compression Planning. It was always my contention that every Black Belt (leaders of Lean Six Sigma Projects) should be a trained and experienced Compression Planning facilitator.”
Michael A. Couch
President
Michael Couch & Associates Inc.
Pittsburgh, PA
“I used CP to help teams of employees coming together from three different nuclear plants to develop common processes that would be implemented as the standard across our fleet. We worked on establishing common processes for everything from the procedures we use to perform work to how we make design modifications to nuclear power plants.
Besides being an effective tool, CP really did make a very difficult job a little easier for the folks involved. These employees were asked to develop these common processes in addition to their normal work so they were only able to come together periodically.
For these teams, CP was a life saver.”
Jeanny Amidon
...in her work with First Energy
Toledo, OH
“Compression Planning is the core methodology in my consulting practice. It is what I am getting to be known for as a business consultant. I use it in one way or another in each and every one of my work engagements.
Use it with your family, with your church, at your work, in your personal decisions. Use it and you will find it to be a great tool to add to your life skills.”
Alfredo Enrique Umaña
Director, Applied Consulting
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Central America
“Frankly, I went to my first CP workshop as something of a skeptic. Many times, such workshops have provided interesting information and a chance to meet good people, but rarely do they live up to their billing.
In any case, I attended because I recognized that my work depended on the ability to get productive and timely work from groups. At the time, our state department of education had just mandated the development of comprehensive district plans in just about every area related to teaching and learning; each had a requirement for a quick turnaround and each one required that the product—the plan—be the result of collaboration among faculty, administrators and parents.
I was looking for insights into group process and group dynamics—a few useful hints, perhaps. What I got was a very different way of looking at things, one that focused on results yet still provided those involved with the respect, dignity and opportunities for meaningful input they deserved. After completing the training, I was able to go back to my school district, work with diverse groups to develop the required plans, and include in those plans really meaningful goals, activities and program assessments.
I’ve been a proponent since then—and I’ve used it in countless ways: strategic planning, program design, program assessment, personnel evaluation, presentations to the community, and team building.”
Robert Feirsen, Ed.D.
Superintendent
Garden City Public Schools
Garden City, NY
“Our work teams find this remarkable system has documented bottom-line results:
- Time to completion drops an estimated 50%
- Errors and mistakes drop an estimated 40%
Most importantly, a sense of total ownership for the process grows among employees ‘10 fold.’ What makes this system particularly unique in today’s over tech world is that it does this without the use of a computer, without any costly hardware.
What used to take us weeks now takes hours with the ‘thinking technology’ that drives the Compression Planning system.”
Doug Hall
Founder and CEO of the world
famous Eureka! Ranch
Newtown, OH
…uses the system to plan every inventing
project he conducts for his impressive
client list: Nike, Walt Disney, Ford Motor
Company, American Express, Hewlett Packard
“I worked for a large public relations agency that was asked to constantly write proposals, which took a lot of thinking and agency time to develop. Some clients would hire us, but a lot of people would simply steal our ideas and recommendations.
Compression Planning helped us solve this problem, not as a brainstorming means for ourselves but as a product we would offer clients. We sold it as the ‘first step’ in working with a client. We used it to explore their current situation, brainstorm possible solutions and prioritize a set of recommendations.
Compression Planning solved two problems. First, it allowed us to get paid for writing a proposal (about $5,000 for a two-hour session with two to three agency and two to three client representatives). Second, our proposal acceptance went way up, because we were now giving recommendations and we already had a chance to start proving ourselves in the kick-off
meeting.
Since that time, I’ve used CP frequently for strategic planning, developing marketing plans and other consensus-building activities. It continues to work great and continues to turn unpaid meetings into events that clients love and that produce results.”
Lloyd Corder, Ph.D.
President & CEO
CorCom, Inc.
Pittsburgh, PA
“I was looking for something that was new and unique to planning. I needed something that was different than writing on flip charts where we had no way to organize or develop an action plan.
Part of my job with the Bureau of Prisons as the
Distance Learning Administrator is to produce all Satellite-Internet Broadcasts, where we produce all types of training and I use Compression Planning to
plan the programs.
There are so many ways that this can be used. I am pushing to convince my administration to use this method with all the unnecessary meetings that we must sit through.
You could use this method to plan a multibillion dollar project to a small project.”
Edward C Wolahan
Correctional Program Specialist
Department of Justice
National Institute of Corrections
Aurora, CO
“When a project needs collaboration, I know of no better way to define and establish that collaboration so that each partner takes ownership and feels good about her/his roll than using Compression Planning.
There is ALWAYS new, and sometimes surprising, information uncovered that strengthen one’s
application.”
Blaise E. Favara, M.D.
South Valley Pediatrics & South Valley
Child and Family Center
Hamilton, MT
“We were hired by an area university to help with a problem they were stymied with. They tried to develop a specific program for two years, but they kept going around in circles. With one Compression Planning session, they were finally able to generate action steps that they had struggled to come up with for two years.”
Dr. Morris Beverage
President
Lakeland Community College
Kirtland, OH
“I was just trained in Compression Planning this last summer of 2008 during my year-and-a-half stay in the United States. Very enthusiastic about the concept and what I have learned, I was sure that it would not only work in the US but also in Europe.
The perfect occasion occurred when we had a retreat of our family-owned Forest Management Company ‘Boscor Forest’ that manages roundabout 30,000 acres of forest land in Germany and Austria. There were six forest engineers, three administrators, three members of the senior management team, plus me as the ‘independent’ facilitator. The goal was to identify critical issues in our day-to-day business in the following areas: Forestry (Production), Administration and Management.
After a day-and-a-half of storyboarding and a lot of fun we came up with five key problems that we needed to address in the next year to improve our outcomes as well as detailed plans that outlined the action steps to solve each problem.
At first, the Germans were very skeptical. In the end, very enthusiastic about Compression Planning and what we had achieved: no more wood production without storyboarding!!”
Constantin von Reizenstein
Ph.D. Student in HealthCare Economics
University of Munich
Co-Owner of a German Forest Estate
“Compression Planning - A Million Dollar Idea
Dear Jerry,
Thank you so much for your Compression Planning seminar I attended last year at Robert Morris University. It has been helpful to me personally and professionally. As a result of that seminar, I've led several sessions in our company and your techniques have proven to be quite useful in helping us generate new marketing ideas.
You'll be interested to know that one idea that came out of one planning session helped develop an idea that generated over $1,000,000 with a single email promotion in less than a week.
I led a Compression Planning brainstorming meeting in Delray Beach, Florida with a few top level copywriters who work with me at Agora, Inc. Agora publishes financial analysis and advice for individual investors. The purpose of the meeting was to generate new headline and lead ideas for promotions. Out of that two-hour meeting came four ideas worth further development for our products.
One of the ideas that came from the brainstorming session was further developed by an editor/copywriter into a promotion for a $10,000 financial product to be sold via the Internet. That one promotion alone generated over 100 orders in less than a week. You do the math. That's over a million dollars.
This was an unusually successful promotion behind a very big idea for an expensive product. A typical email promotion may generate $35,000 to as much as $100,000. So this got a lot of attention. It didn't come without a lot of effort (and also a few headaches), but still the results were remarkable.
Since that planning session, there has been a much greater interest in using Compression Planning for other divisions of our company.
Thom Hickling (deceased)
Freelance writer for Agora Inc.