The vital lessons Price got from Sandler over the years helped him grow and expand his company to become the global juggernaut it is today. Price Associates now has leadership programs in 15 different countries, and its core team of 12 is supplemented by 50 trainers who teach around the world in multiple languages, helping certify the next generation of leaders. As of 2019, Price says the company’s China office alone has certified roughly 1,000 coaches. “I retired from that office last December,” Price says. “I told them that when I turned 65, I was going to retire, so I had my last supper in Beijing. I still have a small ownership part in it, but it’s now functioning without me.” When asked to describe his far-reaching company in a few short sentences, Price says, “Our overarching purpose is to grow great leaders. So, everything we do is around that desire. We do it through helping them understand leadership and develop their own capacities. We do it through innovation. We do it through helping them develop the kind of culture that helps people to keep growing. Usually we just want to get to know them and understand what they love, what they’re doing well, where their successes are, what they see as obstacles to their continued success, and where they’d like to go.” Since stepping back a bit from his day-to-day role in the company he founded, Price has refocused on his career as an author. In the last few years, he’s been working hard to translate his decades of business wisdom into literary fuel for future generations. In 2014, he published two books: “Treasure Inside: 23 Unexpected Principles That Activate Greatness” and “The Complete Leader: Everything You Need to Become a High- Performing Leader,” the latter co-written with Randy Lisk.
Then in 2017, Price and Evans Baiya released “The Innovator’s Advantage: Revealing the Hidden Connection Between People and Process.” Most recently, he collaborated with editor, creative consultant, and success coach Stacy Ennis on a very different kind of business book: “Growing Influence: A Story of How to Lead With Character, Expertise, and Impact,” which hit shelves in 2018. “I had been talking about a couple of aspects of leadership for a number of years, and one of the team members heard me give one of these presentations and said, ‘Ron, you’ve got to get that into a book. I’ve never heard anybody talk that way,’” Price says, recalling the book’s genesis. He reached out to Ennis, who edited a few of his earlier books, and asked her to be his writing assistant. Before they met in person to discuss the work, though, Price had a revelation.
nonfiction book and work,’” he says. “The ideas that I wanted to share were probably too simple or too sterile, and we needed them inside a story. For it to impact people, we had to do it at an emotional level and we had to put it in a story they could relate to.” That spark became the story of a 30-year- old woman named Emily who is stuck in a career as a mid-level manager at a Boise tech company. She’s been repeatedly passed over for promotions and doesn’t understand why until, thanks to a twist of fate and some spilled coffee, she meets David, a much older retired CEO who eventually becomes her mentor. “Through the course of the story, it becomes clear that it’s gender bias, but it’s not toxic gender bias,” Price reveals. “It’s that she has a young child at home and her boss, thinking he’s being kind, doesn’t promote her because he thinks that would be too hard on her family.” The book is as emotional as it is informative, and to really capture Emily’s voice, Ennis stepped into the role of co-
“I had this crazy idea drop into my head from nowhere, and it was, ‘This can’t be a
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