Over his extraordinary career, Walt Carter learned and developed a remarkable ability to lead people, teams, and organizations through massive, transformational changes. Many of these were turnaround efforts, where the teams had gotten off course and needed help to re-orient and re-align to the original mission charter. Some of these were “blue ocean” journeys, where there were many unknowns and uncharted waters. A few were do-overs with a new crew to take on someone else’s mission. In all of them, Walt logged the lessons learned and kept track of what worked and what didn’t.

In We Can’t Stay Here, you will be introduced to the Seven C’s of Effective Change Leadership – Charting your course, Controlling and navigating the journey, Choosing your crew, Casting-off with clarity and alignment, Connecting the crew to the mission and each other, Communicating for calm seas and for storms, and Collaborating for survival and for successful end of mission.

Walt shares lessons and powerful tools to ensure that you can get yourself and your crew all the way through your big transformational changes and not only survive the journey but learn and grow along the way while delivering the goods for your organization.

You’ll learn how to complete your success storyboard before you launch, how to use that storyboard to guide you through the journey and navigate the unknowns and unknowable.

You’ll get tips on how to choose a “sea-worthy” crew, and how to conduct a launch ceremony that cements the value and power of a successful journey with the crew and the sponsors and other stakeholders.

You’ll gain an understanding of how people operate in groups and teams and how you can help connect them to each other and the mission in powerful ways (the true art of the Great Captains!), and you’ll understand the frameworks necessary for communicating throughout a long, hard journey.

Lastly, you’ll know why working together is so hard and yet absolutely necessary and uplifting a strong team can be to successful mission accomplishment.

At the end of the book, you’ll be able to effectively align your team and others to the mission and get the support you need to get the job done in a way that engages and lifts the spirits of all involved. The stories you’ll read here are memorable and when you put these tools and lessons to work, they will help to establish you as an effective change captain – a skill worth a ship’s weight in treasure in the present and for years to come.

Prepare to set off on a new understanding of how to lead change and remember, “We Can’t Stay Here!”