Cal Carrera has been a leadership and culture zealot for 40 years! His mentor Tom Peters, author of “In Search of Excellence”, opened Cal’s eyes to leadership and created a passion for the subject.Prior to that, his focus was on the management of the team he had built from 12 to 125 people. At that time, management approaches were well defined, but great leaders seemed to be born, not made! Tom changed that attitude for him.Culture expert Ken Schatz gave Cal a passion for developing company cultures along with the leadership in creating and maintaining them. He applied Ken’s methodology to his team’s culture, with wonderful success. His team was considered the absolute best by clients, and by themselves! Everyone on the team had a role in capturing business and they were not afraid of new opportunities. They knew they could do it! Everyone on the team felt they were the best and they were proud to be part of the team! Recently, a former competitor, now on the White House Return to the Moon Panel, complimented Cal on this organization: “You guys were the best”!Later in his career, He was assigned to lead an existing company that had many operational problems and a fragmented culture. We also had bought a new company and I had to integrate them into his team.This experience really showed him the difference between a productive culture and one that is not. In this culture, everything was a crisis. VPs were fighting with each other. The team was pulling in different directions. Inefficiency was the norm and profits were much lower than they should have been. He did succeed in increasing profits by resolving conflicts and setting a vision for the operations. He succeeded in selling the company to another public company and set out to start a new company. Next, he co-founded a new healthcare technology company, where he served as Chief Operations Officer.He hired 34 people in 3 months and interviewed each of them with a focus on how well he could integrate them into a great, productive team. He had to move into 3 new offices to handle the growth, but the team was always productive and operating smoothly. His team was proud to be radically changing the way healthcare was delivered to underserved populations throughout California! In a few months, he was approached by a public company interested in a merger. When they visited his facilities, they were amazed at the team and its work. The acquisition was finalized, and a large investor visited us and demanded to invest $20M in our parent company’s private placement!