SOPHISTICATED FINANCE

Talks, Seminars and Workshops I Do

This morning somebody asked me for a list of talks and workshops that I do. A current list is below.

1. The Secret to Successful Entrepreneurship. 4 hours, 8 hours, or 3 days. Entrepreneurship is a popular topic in the media, schools and the workplace. It is also critically important to individuals looking to manage their economic well-being in this new century. However, there are three key concepts in entrepreneurship that get little attention: fear, assumptions and opportunity. Fear holds one back but where does this fear come from. Assumptions are the land mInes that blow up most companies. Picking the opportunity is where one lays the foundation for the scalable business. These topics can be presented individually in half-day or full-day seminars or all together in a comprehensive 3-day workshop. Everyone will need to be an entrepreneur to successfully function in the new era of the 21st Century. This talk is where one can learn the fundamentals.
2.  The Five Step Process to Convert Passions into Innovation. 4 hours, 8 hours, or 3 days. Innovation is perhaps the most popular word that no one defines correctly and consistently creating innovative solutions is always more challenging than it should be. Using the five step approach taught in this program, anyone can create innovations. This approach is not based on design thinking or the other traditional approaches to creativity, but rather draws its inspiration from early childhood development—1-Passion, 2-Discovery, 3-Creativity, 4-Invention, 5-Innovation. Depending on the depth of understanding desired, this topic can be presented in half-day or full-day seminars or in a comprehensive 3-day workshop. If you are interested to learn the lessons every genius throughout history has taught us, this is the event for you.
3. The Five Themes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 4 hours, 8 hours, or 3 days. Klaus Schwab, Chairman of the World Economic Forum, coined the phrase the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” to describe the current period of technological innovation and the resultant massive social, economical and political changes we can expect. While it is important to understand the underlying technologies, the social consequences are more dramatic than any period in history. Whether in half-day or full-day seminar or a 3-day workshop format, this presentation explores the technologies and five major themes that explain the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Anyone trying to prepare and educate people for the 21st Century should attend this event.
4. Social Entrepreneurship: Capitalism Redefined. 4 hours, 8 hours, or 3 days. Capitalism came under attack on many fronts as a result of the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. In simple terms it might be said that the corporates forgot their responsibility to society. On the other hand capitalism is the most efficient way to address social issues at scale, as evidenced by the over 1.5 billion people who have escaped poverty in recent times. To blend this efficiency of capitalism with an integrated approach to solve the most pressing social problems, that challenge is what gave rise to social entrepreneurship. Whether in half-day or full-day seminar or a 3-day workshop format, this presentation defines social entrepreneurship, outlines the special features of its business model and showcases how existing companies can use social entrepreneurship and how non-profit organizations can convert to social entrepreneurship. How to start a social entrepreneurship venture is covered in the 3-day format.

Much of the content for these talks has been put together over the last 12-18 months from lectures I have given at various universities. Many people have heard me teach or speak on these topics at StartUP FIU. Many of my colleagues at StartUP FIU can also speak on these topics, if you wish.

My Upcoming Talk on Complexity and Social Movements for WiseTribe

"Increasingly I believe that we can form a new social contract using the technology available to transfer increased decision making authority to the individual. Rather than "fan the fire" or fight the status quo we should use the technology to avoid the current nodes of power and explore alternative approaches at the individual level. Everyone acknowledges that the current paradigm shift in technology will have profound economic and social changes, but we should not overlook the chance to change the political system."

On Saturday September 24 I am speaking at an event for WiseTribe. I am interested in what they are doing because I think they are exploring a new form of "organization" that could be common in the future. Some of my remarks are below.

I have three interests:
1. Entrepreneurship
2. Creativity and early childhood learning
3. Complexity science

• Entrepreneurship is a result of individual empowerment and leads to economic well being. I spend most of my time teaching people to use social entrepreneurship to solve social and environmental problems. My hope is that eventually we can drop “social” because entrepreneurship becomes so responsive to society’s problems.
• Creativity interests me because it is the basis for invention and innovation. I study it from the perspective of the young child because so many geniuses say their secret was to maintain a childlike attitude.
• Complexity is important because it brings so much insight to understanding people, organizations and networks. There are three types of problems—simple, complicated and complex. Tying your shoes is a simple problem. Building a bridge is complicated, but follow engineering, apply math and bingo a bridge is built. Complicated problems are linear and deterministic. These are the kinds of problems that AI will solve, leaving only the complex problems. Complex problems have independent variables that produce emergent features that are not caused by the variables. Stock markets and social problems are examples of complex problems. Black Swans are a subset of complex problems.
• Now if we take complexity in a simple form to understand people, organizations and networks, we see that the roles of each component changes throughout history. When we lived in caves 40,000 years ago the individual was paramount and there were no organizations or networks. Why—no trust and no sharing
• Roll forward to the Dark Ages—individuals are enslaved, kingdoms and the Catholic Church are dominant organizations and there are no meaningful networks.
• Next 1800s in the U.S.--individuals are becoming empowered after the French Revolution, many small networks such as railroads emerge and the government is emerging as a powerful force. The government increases its dominance throughout the 19th and 20th century because small disorganized networks lend themselves to dominant nodes or organizations.
• However, what we have today thanks to computing and the Internet is large, well organized and connected networks. In this environment what network science tells us is that we no longer need large nodes like government. When networks are organized, information exchange is easy and we no longer need large organizations like universities or governments to store and organize information.
• Now we could talk about how to redefine government or the modern university, but the more interesting question to me is how do we bring about change through the power of the networked individual. Stanford Social Innovation Review has a very interesting article in which they discuss the new concept of emergent strategy. Emergent strategy, as opposed to the traditional strategy concepts of Michael Porter, focuses on an iterative approach using networked partners to solve problems. Trial and error, decentralized exploration, solid evaluation at every step, transparent reporting—these are the features of emergent strategy, 21st century organizations and movements. In fact this has always been the approach of movements like Gandhi and Mandela. This approach based on emergent strategy has also been embraced by the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the most accomplished social organizations in the U.S.
• Now how does all of this apply to WiseTribe? WiseTribe is not an organization. It is a movement, of networked individuals, focused on social and environmental change. WiseTribe is an alternative to government for the management of society—for economic, social and political well being. The government is no longer the default solution. We need to iteratively explore this new power, figure out how to communicate it to more and more people and use WiseTribe(s) to solve the impossible problems that are the ones really worth solving.

Previous thoughts on related subjects are here.

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Validating the Idea--StartUP FIU Talk

I will be giving a talk (with an exercise) on "Validating the Idea" for StartUP FIU on Thursday, June 16 at 615 pm at the MARC Pavilion on the Doral campus. This talk will be a good example of the content that we will be giving to teams in the incubator program starting in September. To apply to the incubator, please go to the StartUP FIU website.

I am the Director of StartUP FIU and the strategy is described in this Miami Herald article. 

 

 

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