: About Me

The Biography of Brad Fregger
Chief Executive Officer
Groundbreaking Press (www.groundbreaking.com)
8305 Arboles Circle, Austin TX 78737
brad@groundbreaking.com, 512-657-8780

Brad Fregger has 45 years combined experience in retailing, corporate training, publishing, and software development. He has worked in large and small companies, started three of his own businesses, and worked as a senior executive in two other startups. He is currently President/CEO of Groundbreaking Press, an author-services book publishing company. Additionally, Brad is a lecturer (professor) at Texas State University-San Marcos (Business Communication and Management).

Brad taught graduate-level courses at Saint Edward's University in Austin, Texas for over five years, including one year (2002) as the Executive in Residence for the Graduate School of Management. Fregger helped develop and then teach courses in the MBA Program (Introduction to eCommerce and Managerial Communications) and the Master of Science in Organizational Leadership & Ethics (Leadership & Imagination). He also designed and taught the on-line version of Introduction to eCommerce, which received strong reviews from the Instructional Technologies department at the University. He has also taught two other courses for both the Graduate School of Management (Human Relations) and New College (Business Communications).

Brad is a practitioner/scholar, using the skills and knowledge he has learned, to amass a remarkable record of accomplishment over the past 25 years. In addition to the numerous programs he developed as founder of three major corporate-training departments (Mervyns, Atari, and Activision), he has produced more than 50 videos, 12 audio books, over 100 consumer and business enterprise software products, including the most successful computer game in the world (Shanghai) and the most played computer game in the world (computer solitaire), and published over 30 books on a wide variety of subjects. He has completed every project begun in the past 25 years, and, even more important, during that time not a single team member left during the development of a product. This is what Brad calls "employee retention."

Brad is an expert in many critical areas of business from customer service to the management of technology. He's an international speaker providing programs to major companies throughout the Middle East (Tunisia, Dubai, Beirut, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar), Europe, and Canada in a broad spectrum of subjects including, effective leadership, negotiation, project management, technical risk management, creativity, and team building. As an author he's written four books, GET THINGS DONE - Ten Secrets of Creating and Leading Exceptional Teams, and, ONE SHOVEL FULL - Telling Stories to Change Beliefs, Attitudes, and Perceptions, LUCKY THAT WAY - Stories of Seizing the Moment While Creating the Games Millions Play, and WHY PUBLISH - Making the Right Choices for Your Book.

In addition, Brad has published articles in professional journals, including a series on book publishing for Sharing Ideas magazine (Los Angeles, California), an article on career change for Career Planning and Adult Development Journal (San Jose, California), and he wrote a column, "On a Tangent" for Creative Pulse magazine (Austin, Texas).

Brad's amazing ability to complete projects on time and on budget, plus his creative management style, caught the attention of Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence), who then featured Brad in his book, Liberation Management.

Brad is especially skilled in facilitation toward solving motivational and managerial communication issues. Brad believes that ineffective communication is at the heart of most personnel issues, but that these issues are often not solved by learning listening techniques, "Courses that teach listening skills can be a waste of time. Why? Because we already know how to listen, we just choose not to. The secret is learning why we make this choice and why it's important to make other choices."

Brad holds a Master's Degree in Futuristics (San Jose State University). His speech, "Earthward Implications of Cosmic Migration," was given at the American Astronautical Society's proceedings in honor of the tenth anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the moon. He is a frequent guest on radio-talk shows across the nation, usually discussing the future of our society in the areas of genetic engineering, space travel, virtual reality, and extinction-level events.

Brad and his wife/business partner, Barbara Foley, live in the Texas hill country South of Austin.

My passion is ...

Writing and Teaching

I know too much about ...

Effective Leadership

My parents always told me ...

Not to brag on yourself

My childhood ambition ...

Be the first man on the moon

My favorite memory ...

Too many

Why I write ...

I have a message to share

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

Books by new authors/Extreme Makeover Home Edition/Rush Limbaugh

My first job ...

Cutting Apricots

My best moment ...

Too many

My inspiration ...

Life

Creative Writing > Memoirs Memoirs: Embracing the unexpected

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Surprises often play a critical role in the creative process and in problem-solving. We find this to be true even in business. 3M Corporation is an excellent example of a company that embraces the unexpected. While this has been true from the beginning, the best example was when one of their newly-developed glues was not as strong as the research chemist had hoped; from that seeming setback arose Post-it Notes. A failed experiment became the company's single biggest profit maker. Likewise, scientists and entertainers enjoy telling about how surprises led to creative solutions and success s...

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