“Everyone is a wealth champion but they must first be a health champion,” says Cross, president of Leadership Alliance, a consulting firm in Stamford, Conn. “What we do is help advisors define key levers of success and key barriers that might trip them up. In many cases, it’s health. If you’re healthier, you are happier, and the odds of you being a long-term committed member of an organization go through the roof.” The curriculum, based on the Japanese Hoshin Kanri strategic priority alignment process, helps the trainee prioritize. “They get very clear on the right things to do in the right order at the right time,” Cross says…

Cross’ workshops teach employees how to make long-term financial plans and set career goals. Staff can attend workshops on company time and repeat them as often as they wish. Cross based his workshops on Deming’s philosophy about business management, which has been widely adopted in Japan and by some U.S. corporations such as Intel Corp. and Ford Motor Co. Deming said he believed companies could boost business and employee morale by fostering teamwork. “If you treat staff as your No. 1 asset and help them in all areas of their lives, it helps the business,” Cross said…

Leadership can be summed up in one word: prediction. As Matthew Cross, president and chief strategist of the Stamford, Conn.-based Leadership Alliance, frames it, “Leaders on the whole make predictions about future outcomes that come true more often than not. That’s why Warren Buffett is so renowned. He makes a lot of calls or predictions that come true more often than not. That’s why we talk about Warren.” Cross says advisors can strengthen their predictive intelligence by taking a step back from their everyday business and surveying their complete ecosystem…

Ironically, living an authentic, conscious life nowadays probably requires us to manage ourselves like enlightened modern multinationals. The person who really brought this idea home is Matthew Cross, president of consulting group Leadership Alliance in Stamford, Connecticut. Cross became a trainer of Hoshin, a Japanese word roughly meaning both internal compass and personal North Star. Hoshin is a practice inspired by Deming, designed to break through apparent chaos to find a hidden higher order and direction…

The word “Hoshin” means the method of discovering the inner compass and the guiding star, Cross said. “The reasoning is that the individual, and for that matter, the corporation, has all the information and wisdom necessary to function at peak performance. The only challenge is in most people, it’s all mixed up and scattered,” he said. “What this process does is line it up, configure it, so that the individual or company can function like a laser beam, as opposed to being scattered light.” Through a series of interactive sessions, Cross helps participants to identify and clarify their purposes, ambitions and goals…

The name of his company—Leadership Alliance—was carefully chosen. “In general, leaders are seen as Lone Rangers who don’t form alliances except in tough times,” explains Matthew. Through the mash-up of these two apparently opposite concepts—Leadership and Alliance—Matthew set out to create a new paradigm: based on Deming’s and Juran’s theories, each person who contributes to the final product or service can be a leader in their job and experience joy and pride in their work. The true leader supports all employees to become leaders for the benefit of the whole enterprise…

The Golden Ratio Lifestyle Diet takes a unique approach to wellness by incorporating information from a variety of scientific disciplines to explore longevity. Right from the get-go the introduction lets readers know that this is not your run-of-the-mill lifestyle health plan. The Fibonacci Sequence and Nature’s Heartbeat are some of the topics that are so thoroughly researched and explained with real-world examples that the book will quickly win you over…

Typically we think of nutrients as edible forms of sustenance, things that we can taste and swallow like vitamins, minerals, or herbs. What if there was another nutrient, a different nutrient, one with no mass, taste, calories or cost? Renowned strategist and lifestyle coach Matthew Cross and immune system and longevity specialist Robert Friedman, M.D., argue that just such a mysterious nutrient exists. They call it Nature’s Secret Nutrient (NSN), which stands for the application of the Golden Ratio to your diet and lifestyle, yet the ideas proposed by Cross and Freidman go much farther than…

Steve Jobs was spotted recently at Apple Inc.’s Cupertino, Calif., campus, according to reports. Business Insider said an eyewitness saw the CEO at Apple headquarters in late January and that “he was loking good.” Cross, who also works as a bank consultant, was in California for a meeting with Bank of America Corp. officials and stopped by Apple to drop off a copy of a book he had co-written that mentions Jobs and to buy a few items from the Apple campus gift shop. Cross told the Insider that the Apple co-founder had “a healthy spring in his step” and that his “voice was strong…”

Cross said, “I train along Deming’s philosophy. His idea was to optimize an entire operation over time by emphasizing cooperation and collaboration over win-lose competition, as it is imperative to utilize the wisdom of everyone in an organization.” Cross said of his work, “It inspires, informs, and motivates organizations to exceed their objectives in the shortest amount of time with a minimum of waste for profound results.”