Executive Development Program

The Executive Accelerator

Five competencies. Nine sessions. One executive.

Cohort 1 · October 2026
Twelve seats
Tuesdays · 4:00 to 5:30 pm Eastern
Apply for Cohort 1 See the curriculum
9
Sessions
12
Maximum cohort
90
Minutes each
5
Competencies
0
Theory

At some point, 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.

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 applied 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.

Nine sessions. No theory.

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.
FormatLive virtual. All participants on camera.
CadenceTuesdays, 4:00 to 5:30 pm Eastern.
Cohort sizeTwelve maximum.
RecordingsSessions are not recorded.

Two parties have to be right for this 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.
  • 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.
  • The return is not hypothetical. Participants apply the work to live 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.

What the Organization Will Observe

Nothing is reported out of the sessions, so what the company sees is behavior. Decision framing gets sharper. 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.

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 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.

Priced to reflect what it is.

A nine-session working engagement with an experienced executive, not a course. Comparable short-format programs at major business schools run $10,000 to $20,000. Cohort 1 is $5,500 per seat.

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
  • Quarterly alumni check-ins for one year

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.

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

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 distribution and sales 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.

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.

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
Complete the application
Four questions. Takes about fifteen minutes.
2
Decision within 5 days
Applications reviewed in the order received.
3
Accept your offer
Sign the enrollment agreement and confirm your seat.
4
Submit payment
Pay securely online. Your seat is confirmed upon receipt.

Complete the online application. A seat is held only once the enrollment agreement and tuition are both received.

Apply for Cohort 1
Questions before applying? Write to chip@talkwithchip.com or schedule a 15-minute call.

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