About Us
Leading the A4S team is our CEO, Jerry Cahn Ph.D., J.D. Trained as a psychologist and attorney, he’s a serial entrepreneur, strategic consultant, policy analyst, college educator and executive coach. He’s worked in all sectors of the economy: public and, private companies, non-profit firms and government (including Capitol Hill). Among his career achievements is the co-founding and leading of Brilliant Image, a 24/7 computer-generated presentation service which served (over 15 years) 5000+ Fortune500 firms, investment banks, private equity and other firms who had time-critical presentation needs. Throughout his career, he serves as a trusted advisor to leaders who want more growth, professionally and personally.
In addition to guiding the implementation of the A4S system for organizations, today he serves as:
- A NYC Board Chairman for Vistage Worldwide , which serves 23,000 CEOs in 20 countries),
- Chief trainer and coach for Presentation Excellence, which enable leaders committed to winning large critical deals to close more deals, faster,
- CEO and CLO for Age Brilliantly, which provides adults of all ages who are committed to leading fulfilling, elongated lives (to 100+) to get needed information, inspiration, tools, support and services/products
Accountable4Success was created a few years ago when Dr. Cahn met several Vistage members who wanted to instill greater accountability within their firms so employees and the companies would be more successful. As a pioneer in the evaluation of services industry, he learned about a new service developed by a Vistage member, called Evaluate to Win (ETW). The CEO and his team turned a failing aerospace company and into a very successful one. They developed a company operating system called which focused on three foundational elements: strategy, culture and talent development. It recognized that for a company to “win” at achieving its strategic goals, each employee had to “win” at accomplishing those responsibilities that made the strategy possible. It worked: over the next five years, through the Great Recession, the company achieved a 20+% CAGR (compound average growth rate). As a result, Dr. Cahn became trained as an ETW consultant to help small- and medium-sized businesses use the system.
One day, the Ceo (Lee Benson) introduced it to Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, who was teaching at his leadership Institute. Mr. Welch described it as “the best business management system I’ve ever seen”. He became a business partner and later helped transition the company into Execute To Win which focused on larger companies focused on enterprise performance optimization.
Dr. Cahn recognized that mid-size companies still needed an operating system to aligned worker’s responsibilities to successful achievement of corporate strategy, culture and leadership objectives. He also recognized that performance management and feedback was essential – and needed to be available year-round, not just at annual review times. Thus the essential link was the job agreement between each manager and worker – from the CEO to the lowest worker.
With that he created the A4S system and enabled the CEOs with whom he was working to adopt it. Eventually, other leaders wanted to adopt it also – which led to the creation of Accountable4Success as a division of Presentation Excellence