Advisory Leadership: Using the Seven Steps of Heart Culture to Create Lasting Success for Any Wealth Management Firm

Foreword

Greg Friedman is one big walking heart. Don’t let that fool you; he successfully leads with it. So many of us in business mistake leadership for power and forcefulness. The very nature of the word conjures up a powerful figure: standing, arms forward, commanding the pack. Greg reminds us it’s possible to lead while standing beside, or even behind, those who look to you for authority and guidance.

One of the great things about aging is that you genuinely can’t remember when you became friends with people, but it often seems like you have known them forever. I don’t know the year that I met Greg, but I vividly remember the circumstances around it. My partner and I had just spent a small fortune paying a programmer to create client relationship management software that we could use to track client-related work and to keep a diary of our relationship with our clients. There was nothing like this on the market and we sorely needed it. Heck, the whole industry needed it. But our results were a disaster.

Then I heard that Greg and his partner, Ken Golding, had just created something that might really work. I picked up the phone to ask him about it. I told him what a mess we’d created. I told him how much money we had thrown away on our project. And I told him that I had no idea where to go next. Greg didn’t wait a heartbeat to offer assistance. “Look,” he said, “we’ve got something we call BAM (basically a monkey can do it). I’ll give it to you. All I ask is that if you have ...