Julia Stewart, President, School of Coaching Mastery, Guest on Des Walsh & Friends Show

Last week, on my Des Walsh & Friends show on BlogTalkRadio, I had the great pleasure of catching up with an esteemed coaching colleague, Julia Stewart.

Julia is a coach, coach trainer, and seminar leader, who uses her creativity and humor to expand people’s thinking and inspire them to work brilliantly. She is passionate about the power of coaching to transform the world and is committed to helping coaches forge positive change with the help of powerful coaching skills.

Julia is a founding member of the International Association of Coaching (IAC) and an IAC Certified Coach. She founded the School of Coaching Mastery in 2007.

We met at a Coachville conference in San Francisco in 2003 and have maintained a virtual contact since then.

In our chat we covered a number of topics around coaching, including:

how the School of Coaching Mastery was established
how being a coach can be a new career for Boomers
recollections of our mutual mentor, the late Thomas Leonard
thoughts on the value of coaching for people finding themselves, voluntarily or involuntarily, no longer in paid employment and without a position title

Julia has some excellent, free resources, including e-books, on her School of Coaching Mastery site.

[If the player above does not appear, use this link to hear the recording].

Social Media in the enterprise: speaking with Axel Schultze on Des Walsh & Friends

Axel Schultze, CEO of Xeequa and Social Media Academy, was my guest recently on my Des Walsh & Friends show on BlogTalkRadio.

The recorded session can be accessed via the player below or the link at the end of the post.

One of the early advocates, users and experts in the social media space, Axel recently initiated Social Business One, a community focused on how businesses are adopting social computing to engage with customers, improve employee productivity and create a competitive advantage.

As one of the Alpha users of LinkedIn, a beta user of Twitter and one of the first business executives on Facebook, Axel is a highly experienced user of social computing tools and a respected thought leader in the enterprise world.

In our discussion on BlogTalkRadio, Axel shared a number of insights about social media in the enterprise, especially from the perspective of “the way customers do things”, e.g. the way customers buy now, and the whole customer experience.

Some snippets:

Social media – more a mindset than technology
“Take the ‘media’ out of social media”
There is a huge disconnect between the way people sell and the way people buy
Existing sales tools are built around old processes – which does not help the salesperson achieve success – and what can be done about that

You can see Axel’s various locations on the social web at his XeeSM site.

[If the player above does not appear, use this link to hear the recording].