Executive Development Program · Talk with Chip

The Executive Accelerator™

Five competencies. Nine sessions. One executive.

A cohort-based development program for executives stepping into greater scope, and for those who have hit a ceiling and want to understand why.

Led by Chip Carlson
Cohort 1 begins October 6, 2026
Twelve seats
Apply for Cohort 1 See the curriculum
Free Live Session — Thursday, August 27

Five Patterns That Create the Executive Ceiling

Thursday, August 27  •  12:00pm Central  •  90 minutes  •  No charge

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01/The Problem This Program Solves

At some point in every executive career, everything you have always done stops being enough.

You keep executing. You keep delivering. The outcomes are different. There is a ceiling, and you can feel it before you can name it.

Most executives experience this as a performance problem. They work harder, execute more cleanly, and stay confused about why it is not working.

Nobody prepared you for that moment, because those same skills got you promoted every time before.

The reason is not performance. It is altitude. The skills that produced your career, speed, precision, reliable execution, brought you to a level where they are no longer sufficient.

The same gap opens on the way up. An executive handed a larger mandate is asked to operate at an altitude the last role never required, and the transition is rarely taught.

The Executive Accelerator is built for two executives: the one who has reached that ceiling, and the one who has just been handed the scope that will produce it.

Nine
Weekly working sessions, ninety minutes each, with one scheduled break
Twelve
Maximum cohort size, live and on camera throughout
Zero
Theory. Every competency is applied to the participant's real decisions
02/What the Program Builds

The five competencies of the Executive Decision Flywheel™

An integrated system that changes not just what you decide, but how you see. Each competency is taught through direct application to the participant's real decisions, real numbers, and real organizational challenges.

01
Decision Clarity
Knowing which decisions are yours, whether you are answering the right question, and how much information you actually need in order to decide.
02
Financial Fluency
Reading financial signals as decision inputs, tracing every number to the decision that created it and the decision it now requires.
03
Strategic Perspective
Holding the present situation and the future direction simultaneously, and seeing what most executives miss from operational altitude.
04
Organizational Influence
Moving organizations through enrollment rather than authority, and understanding why authority produces compliance while influence produces alignment.
05
Personal Leadership System
A built system, not an intention, for who you are under pressure. Pressure reveals the leader, not the plan.
03/The Curriculum

The nine sessions

Nine Tuesdays at 4:00 pm Eastern, October 6 through December 8, 2026, with one scheduled break for Thanksgiving week. Between-session assignments carry structural weight. Each one feeds directly into the next session.

Date Session Focus
Oct 6The FoundationThe ceiling. The two altitudes. The cohort contract.
Oct 13Decision Clarity: FoundationsOwnership. Framing. Threshold. Your real decision in the room.
Oct 20Decision Clarity: ApplicationThe retrospective. Pressure architecture. The crack in identity.
Oct 27Financial FluencyThree statements. Every number is a decision's echo. Your three numbers.
Nov 3Strategic PerspectiveThe avoided question. Three strategic traps. The landscape read.
Nov 10Organizational InfluenceThe social current. Authority versus influence. The enrollment approach.
Nov 17Personal Leadership SystemFour defaults. Pressure architecture. Building the system.
— Thanksgiving week · no session —
Dec 1Flywheel IntegrationFive reinforcement pairs. Where your flywheel breaks. The cohort mirror.
Dec 8The ReturnThe Return Brief. Two failure modes. Cohort commitment. The conversation.
Format
Live virtual. All participants on camera.
Cadence
Tuesdays, 4:00 to 5:30 pm Eastern. October 6 to December 8, 2026.
04/Who This Program Is For

Two parties have to be right for this program to work

The Participant
  • Director, VP, or senior manager who has hit a ceiling they can feel but not fully name.
  • Or an executive recently promoted, named as a successor, or handed materially larger scope, who now has to operate at a different altitude.
  • At least five years of management experience, currently accountable for a team, a P&L, or a business unit.
  • Ready to work on real decisions, and willing to be honest about the ones that are not working.
The Sponsoring Organization
  • Companies developing high potentials, named successors, and newly promoted executives, as readily as those investing in a leader who has plateaued.
  • The return is not hypothetical. Participants apply the work to live organizational decisions immediately.
  • Every seat in the founding cohort is $5,500, whether the organization sponsors one executive or three.
  • Twenty-seven hours across ten weeks, with no management time required to administer it.
9
Weekly sessions
90
Minutes each
12
Maximum cohort
Oct 2026
Cohort 1 begins
What the Organization Will Observe

Nothing is reported out of the sessions, so what the company sees is behavior. Decision framing gets sharper: the participant separates the decision that is theirs from the one that is not before the meeting starts. Financial questions change shape, from what a number is to which decision produced it. Fewer problems get passed upward, and the ones that reach you arrive with the options and the threshold already defined.

Enrollment is by application. Not to screen for credentials, but to confirm the fit is right and the participant is ready for the work.

05/What Participants Leave With

Five deliverables, built during the program, not after it

Flywheel Map
A personal map of their Executive Decision Flywheel: which competencies are working, which are breaking, and where the reinforcing connections are.
Personal Leadership System
A one-page written system, not an intention, documenting their primary default under pressure, their pressure architecture, their signal-pause-return practice, and one structural support.
Return Brief
A four-question document committing to what they will protect, who holds them accountable, what structural support they are building, and what their earliest atrophy signal is.
Financial Fluency Practice
The habit of reading financial signals as decision inputs, with the backward trace and forward question practice applied to their own numbers.
Accountability Partner and Cohort
A one-to-one accountability pair with a standing call scheduled before the final session ends, plus quarterly cohort check-ins for one year after the program.

Nothing in this program is theoretical.

06/The Investment

Priced to reflect what it is: a nine-session working engagement with an experienced executive, not a course

Founding Cohort,
October 2026
$5,500
Per participant
One price for every seat in Cohort 1, individual or corporate. Reserved for the participants who help shape the program.
Standard,
Later Cohorts
$6,999
Per participant
The enrollment price for every cohort after the founding cohort closes.
Corporate,
Later Cohorts
$6,200
Per participant
Three or more seats from the same organization, in cohorts after the founding cohort.
Every Seat Includes
  • Nine live 90-minute working sessions
  • Cohort accountability partner
  • Complete participant workbook, combined and per-session
  • Quarterly alumni check-ins for one year post-program

Cohort size is capped at twelve. The founding price applies to Cohort 1 only and closes when it fills. If the cohort does not run, tuition paid is refunded in full.

07/For the Approving Executive

What the company is approving, and what it gets back

The program requires no management participation and runs independently of the participant's reporting line, the same way a university executive program does.

Total Time Commitment
27 hours

Across ten weeks. Thirteen and a half hours of live session time, plus roughly ninety minutes of applied work per week, performed on the participant's own decisions.

Certificate of Completion
Verified

Issued by Talk with Chip LLC on completion of the nine sessions and the five deliverables. One missed session may be recovered through a thirty-minute session with Chip. It certifies comprehension, not seat time.

Confidentiality Is the Mechanism

Everything discussed in session stays between the participant, the cohort, and Chip. Nothing is reported back to the employer. That is not a limitation on the program's value, it is the condition that produces it. Executives only work on the decisions that are genuinely not working when they are certain the room is closed. The company sees the result in the participant's judgment, not in a transcript.

How the Investment Compares

Comparable short-format executive development programs at major business schools generally run between $10,000 and $20,000 per participant, taught by faculty. Cohort 1 is $5,500 per seat, every seat, taught by an executive who held the seat and applied to decisions the participant is carrying right now.

08/Sponsor Alignment and Enrollment

What the sponsor agrees to at the start, and how a seat is confirmed

Sponsor Alignment · Founding Cohort Provision

A sponsor should know what it is developing, even though it will never know what was said. For Cohort 1, each sponsored seat carries a written development goal and one observable expectation, chosen at enrollment by the participant and the sponsor from the list below and optionally confirmed on a twenty-minute call with all three parties. Chip confirms completion to the sponsor at the end of the program. No session content is shared at any point.

The Observable Expectation Is Chosen From
  • Quality of decision framing
  • Interpretation of financial impact
  • Speed from problem to decision
  • Cross-functional influence without authority
  • Problems escalated with a recommendation attached
  • Effectiveness under pressure

The participant self-assesses against the agreed indicator in session one and again in session nine, and those results stay with the participant. The purpose is the same one a 360 review or a coaching engagement serves at a major business school: making the change in the executive visible. It is not a business dashboard, and the program does not claim to measure outcomes it does not control.

Enrollment and Terms
  • Admission is by written application, four questions, reviewed personally in the order received.
  • Cancellation fifteen to twenty-nine days out is subject to a fee of fifty percent. No refund inside fourteen days or after the program begins.
  • The seat is confirmed on payment. Credit card with receipt, or an invoice on request for employer-sponsored seats and purchase orders.
  • Before session one, the seat may be substituted at no charge to another qualified executive in the same organization.
  • Written cancellation thirty or more days before session one receives a full refund.

Enrollment is by application. Applications are reviewed in the order received, and a seat is held only once payment or an approved purchase order is in place.

09/About Chip Carlson

Three decades in the seat, not three decades studying the seat

Chip Carlson
Founder · Talk with Chip LLC
Experience
President, Vice President, General Manager, and Country Manager across automotive aftermarket and industrial distribution, United States, Mexico, and Latin America.
Contact
chip@talkwithchip.com
talkwithchip.com
linkedin.com/in/carlsonchip

Chip Carlson has spent more than three decades in sales, marketing, operations, and distribution at the operating and senior executive level, including as Vice President of International Business Development for one of the largest publicly traded automotive parts retailers in North America, with sales over $16 billion.

In that role he was P&L responsible for the integration and management of a 3,000-person international division, growing it from 19 stores to 65 and from 1,100 to 3,000 employees, and opened a 375,000 square foot distribution center.

He took from his career something most executive education does not teach: an understanding of exactly why talented leaders hit the ceiling, built from watching it happen across hundreds of organizations and from making the same decisions himself, under pressure, with real consequences.

During more than ten years as President of Cima International LLC he has consulted for more than forty companies across the automotive aftermarket and industrial markets, including multiple Fortune 500 organizations. He is the host of Talk with Chip, a podcast for executives and business leaders, and the founder of the Executive Accelerator program.

The Executive Accelerator is the program he wished had existed when he needed it. Everything in it comes from direct experience, not theory and not methodology borrowed from someone else's consulting practice.

How to Apply

Twelve seats. Cohort 1 begins October 6, 2026.

Enrollment is by application. Not to screen for credentials, but to confirm the fit is right and the participant is ready for the work. Applications are reviewed in the order received.

1
Download the application
Four questions. Complete all sections.
2
Email it to Chip
chip@talkwithchip.com
3
Decision within 5 days
In the order received.
Download the Application

Questions before applying? Write to chip@talkwithchip.com — or write directly to apply or reserve seats for your organization.