Vinny Boles

Major General (Retired) Vinny Boles is a distinguished military leader and keynote speaker who brings decades of U.S. Army leadership experience to the corporate stage. He was commissioned from the Army ROTC program at Niagara University as a Distinguished Military Graduate in 1976 and built a career leading soldiers and organizations at the highest levels of military command.

Leadership Forged in Military Service

Boles spent his career developing and leading teams in some of the most demanding environments on earth. His military leadership experience spans tactical operations, strategic planning, and the human dynamics of building cohesive units that execute reliably under extreme pressure. He understands that the principles of effective leadership are universal, whether applied on the battlefield or in the boardroom.

Military Leadership for the Corporate World

Boles translates military leadership principles into frameworks that corporate audiences can apply immediately. His presentations provide practical strategies for building high-performance teams. His keynotes deliver proven strategies for building trust and team cohesion under pressure, decision-making with incomplete information in high-stakes situations, creating teams that execute reliably when it matters most, and the leadership principles forged in military service that drive results in any organization.

What? How? Who?: The 3 Critical Questions Leaders Must Ask and Answer
The fog in leadership today is too much…too much data without information; too many choices without criteria; too many inputs masquerading as “need to know” that in realty are just noise. It all distracts leaders and teams from developing the focus and synergy that determines success.

Using his 4 decades of battlefield, classroom and boardroom experience – tested in the toughest crucibles – Major General Boles provides the tools for leaders and teams to optimize performance.

Your leaders and teams will leave the event armed with the three questions they must ask AND answer before committing themselves to a task. Questions they can begin using immediately. The questions are not complicated but they are vital.

1. What is the standard you are committing yourself and your team to accomplish?
2. How will the team attain that standard?
3. Who is in charge of what?

4-3-2-1 Leadership….Tools You Can Use Now!
Leaders today don’t require the kind of help that sounds good in a PowerPoint presentation but fades under the heat and pressure of reality. They need tools that hold up when the stakes are high, so that they can be better practitioners of their leadership craft. Using his 33 years of experience in leading America’s sons and daughters and providing the right support in the toughest conditions, Major General Boles delivers time tested tools you can begin using right now. Items like:

4 expectations teams have of leaders
3 critical questions leaders need to ask AND answer
2 reasons for stress in teams
1 truth to never forget when leading

Leveraging The Links In Your Supply Chain
Drawing on his 3 decades as a career soldier and logistician at every level, Major General Boles will walk through the links in the world’s largest and most complex supply chain from the port to the Pentagon and highlight 4 critical issues that will snag/kink your supply chain:

• Standards you use
• Systems you put in place to attain those standards
• Who is in charge of the critical points of intersection?
• Metrics: Leading, Lagging . . .what and how you measure

Providing real world examples of what worked, what didn’t, and why – Major General Boles will lay out a real-world depiction of a supply chain in motion. You and your team will have “news you can use” to better optimize your supply chain, whether across town or around the globe.

Leadership – That Tool That Lies Between Juggling and Magic
Juggling is a verb defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as: to keep several objects in motion in the air at the same time by repeatedly throwing and catching them.

Magic is a noun meaning: a power that allows people to do impossible things by saying special words or performing special actions.

Leadership is that topic that, alphabetically, finds itself between these two, and often is confused with them. As evidenced by these questions and replies often asked of, and heard from, leaders: “What are you doing? I’m just keeping balls in the air” or “How did we make that happen? Magic.”

Bringing his 40 years of military and business expertise to groups around the globe ranging from 40 to 4,000, Major General Vincent “Vinny” Boles provides a lens to view your (and your team’s) leadership practices, processes and actions. He works to create a structure to ensure they are consciously and proactively providing the maximum value added to your organization’s most precious resource: its human capital.