One Fortune 50 company on Wall Street was having problems with its customer service personnel. The executives of a division were distraught as their bottom line plummeted. In meeting with the customer service department, I learned how dis-empowered they felt. I returned to their director and told him I would create sequential Lunch-and-Learns for this group. These would stretch over ten weeks. I boldly promised that by the time the program ended, his staff would feel much hap- pier about themselves. Certainly, I knew this was not “corporate speak.” But I also knew what I knew.

The director squinted and sternly leveled his eyes at me. He growled, “I don’t care about how happy these people feel.” Not missing a beat, and with full awareness that I might be about to sabotage my future in this company, I rebutted, “Oh, yes you do!”

What happened between my assertive pitch and the director writing me a six figure check, I cannot say. But a few weeks later, there I was in front of his staff, training them in interpersonal strategies they had never heard about.

This division’s bottom line immediately began to soar. A manager told me about one of her direct reports who had entered her office to give her an update. As she always did, the manager purportedly listened while typing on her computer, not looking up at the subordinate delivering the news.

It was just a few weeks into our training, but the direct report assertively said, “Mary, I need you to be looking at me while I give you the details you requested.” Mary was shocked. She’d never heard anyone on her team assert herself this way.

Traditionally, the thought is that management training is for the underlings, not the upper crust. But I know that if we throw a pebble in the ocean, there will be a rippling effect. As the customer service staff became empowered, their bosses would need to change their own business behaviors. Some of them complained, but the results paid off.

The impact of my work was so dramatic for this division’s bottom line, other divisions in the corporation re- quested I create the same magic for them. My tenure at this company lasted years, and I’m still in touch with many of those people.

I was also a business school professor, now Professor Emerita. While my professorial colleagues in our undergraduate and MBA program taught courses with the standard textbooks, I did not. Instead, I scoured publishers’ book lists to discover hidden secrets of business success that needed to be grasped.

Books like “Machiavelli,” “The Art of War,” “48 Laws of Power,” martial arts books, and even my own best-selling mass market tome, “Don’t Bet on the Prince!” punctuated students’ required reading lists.

Personally, I never colored inside the box, even when I was getting my Ph.D. in Educational Leadership at New York University. Sometimes I got in trouble, and other times professors wrote me off as “crazy.” But the work I do is for the people I touch. And the people I touch have penned amazing unsolicited testimonials that you can read on my website www.DrGilda.com.

I am grateful to be doing this unique corporate healing, because corporate healing is personal healing, and who’s to say which comes first? Each day, I expand into other arenas that need empowerment work. Recently, I created a non-profit company, Country Cures, that empowers Homeless Female Veterans. Unusually, our programs use Country Music to get our points across—and we’re saving Female Veterans’ lives, along with those of their children and communities.

Similarly, with the swelling numbers of young women experiencing date rape, dating violence, and even suicide, I created an empowerment program that is saving their lives, too. It’s reflective of the mass market, as you can gather from its title, “Don’t Lie on Your Back for a Guy Who Doesn’t Have Yours.” But this book has been so popular with young women, I also wrote its companion, “My Rants & Ramblings Journal.” It contains 365 Gilda-Grams®, one for each day of the year, where young women can explore their empowerment expansion through sequential journaling techniques.

Contrary to what that Fortune 50 director believed before he met me, Empowered people are happy people. Happy people are productive employees and emotionally healthy human beings! Those are the only kind of people you want driving the bottom line.

I have impacted many groups, from youngsters to CEOs. I know that the real meaning of life is never in the lines, but between the lines—in the people who achieve the task for which a company must show profit. It is people skills that drive these profits. It is these people skills that we must nurture.

“One-Up Strategies Business Schools Don’t Teach” was derived from corporate papers I wrote and delivered, my published CEO magazine articles, and my continued consulting work in corporate America. Today, I do keynote and motivational speeches, I conduct Lunch- and-Learns across the country, and I privately consult with executives and non-executives on my Advice & Coaching platform on DrGilda.com. In all, I am grateful to grow from those who seek me out, as much as they say they grow from me.

-Dr. Gilda

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Dr. Gilda Carle (Ph.D.) is an internationally known management consultant, relationship educator, author, business school Professor Emerita, product spokesperson, and media personality. She conducts keynotes at corporations, and provides coaching throughout the world. By uniquely integrating self-worth principles with net worth strategies, she is renowned for quickly raising the bottom line.

She is also President of Country Cures® (www.CountryCures.org), a non-profit educational charity she developed to provide Homeless Female Veterans with Empowerment Skills Training. Her programs distinctively use Country Music to save the lives of these SHEroes, along with those of their children and communities. For this unusual work, Dr. Gilda has earned the title “Country Music Doctor.”

Having successfully fused personal relationship essentials with business achievement, she has authored 17 mass market relationship books, including “Don’t Bet on the Prince!” (a test question on “Jeopardy!”), “How to WIN When Your Mate Cheats” (literary award winner from London Book Festival), and for teens and millennials, “Don’t Lie on Your Back for a Guy Who Doesn’t Have Yours,” with its companion, “My Rants & Ramblings Journal.”

She wrote the weekly “30-Second Therapist” column for the Today Show, the “Ask Dr. Gilda” column for Match.com, she was the relationship expert on TV’s Sally Jessy Raphael show, and every other national TV talk and news show, and she has conducted Relationship Wellness training for Columbia University Medical Center.

Dr. Gilda hosted MTV's “Love Doc,” she was the therapist in HBO’s Emmy Award winner, “Telling Nicholas” featured on Oprah, where she guided a family to tell their 7-year-old that his mom died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, she was the TV host for Fox’s “Dr. Gilda” show pilot, and she hosts TV shows on Trinity Broadcasting Network. Her popular website is www.DrGilda.com