We’ve all seen the Kid President videos by now. A cute kid in a Sunday suit (played by Robby Novak) who uplifts us all with his straight talk about life. In 2013, the Kid President videos took the internet by storm, leading to an internet series on Rainn Wilson’s Soulpancake featuring celebrity guests.
While we all remember Novak’s smiling face in front of the camera, bantering with celebs and talk show hosts, you probably don’t know the Kid President co-creator Brad Montague, who only came out for occasional cameos or prompted Novak off camera.
The creative mind behind the Kid President
While Novak is the star, Montague is the storytelling expert and inspirational keynote speaker who made it all possible. Before Kid President, he had been making films, videos, and entertainment for people ever since he was a kid. All he wanted to do was to create fun things and to help people. But it wasn’t until he decided to make a short video with Novak, almost on a whim, that his career took off and ending up meeting the likes of Obama, Beyonce, and Tom Hanks as part of the ongoing Kid President series.
If you haven’t seen him in person, Montague’s talks are funny, inspiring, and touching as he encourages others to do their small part to make the world a better place through joyful rebellion. Some takeaways from his talk include:
Live with wonder, wisdom, and whimsy
If you’re a kid, used to be a kid, or still a kid at heart, Montague says to live with wonder, wisdom, and whimsy. Approach things as if they were new and never lose that sense of wonder you had as a child.
Treat everybody like it’s their birthday
Montague’s life and work is all about connection. His advice to others is to treat everybody like it’s their birthday. That doesn’t mean buy them a present, but it does mean that every person is worth celebrating. And it stops you from punching them in the face when communication breaks down.
Choose to hug the haters
There will always be people who are unhappy or having a bad day. But Montague wants to remind us we have a choice in how we respond to hate. He says “haters gonna hate, but huggers gonna hug.” When Montague had negative comments in his Twitter feed, he and Novak responded with love and empathy, not hate. They didn’t change everyone’s world view, but they were able to connect with some haters on a deeper level—and turn them to huggers.
If you are interested in booking Montague for your next event, contact BigSpeak Speakers Bureau today.
Now that your brackets are locked in with the Louisville/Minnesota tip-off, it’s time we tell you who’s actually going to win NCAA’s March Madness this year. The 2019 bracket competition has been under severe scrutiny from people across the nation sitting on their couches in Zion Williamson jerseys because of recent developments in artificial intelligence.
Last season, Adobe Analytics AI applications drafted a March Madness bracket with 98% accuracy and Sportsline’s AI feature dabbled with 95% accuracy. This year both software companies are boasting that advances in AI are making their predictions unstoppable.
Adobe Analytics is working with 3.5 million rows of data from Sportradar this season as opposed to the 50,000 or so it used last year. Compiling statistics from 56,000 college basketball games, Adobe places Duke as the big winner for their sixth national title. The software uses over 100 key metrics including offensive and defensive rebounds, three-point shooting, player height, free-throw percentage and so much more.
Owner of the Golden State Warriors (and a handful of other professional sports teams) Peter Guber is a testament to following the numbers. His data-based leadership turned the Warriors into a championship team in three of the last four seasons. The 2017 book Betaball, written about Guber and co-owner Lacob’s innovative decision-making, explains the science behind ignoring fan-favorites and marketing gold-mines to create a team based solely on data.
With AI doing the heavy lifting for you, it’s not a bad idea to take a page out of Guber’s book and lean into the data.
After last year’s upset when a No. 16 seed UMBC beat out Virginia, a No. 1 seed, we all know sometimes there’s just no rhyme or reason to it. So can this technology really win you the pot?
Last season neither software foresaw UMBC’s victory, but with the advances there is a chance even the most surprising wins may not be a surprise. So, here’s Adobe’s possibly flawless bracket for all you cheaters.
Jessica Welch is the Content Marketing Associate at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau, holding a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature and Anthropology from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Her business thought articles often appear on Business 2 Community, Born 2 Invest, and YF Entrepreneurs.
Robyn Benincasa might be the most formidable person we know. Not only is she an adventure-racing world champion and 10-time Ironman racer, but she also serves her community as a San Diego firefighter. On top of that, she is a bestselling author of How Winning Works and considered a thought leader on teamwork and leadership.
After a life of racing, Robyn needed two hip replacements and was told by the doctors she would barely be able to walk, let alone race ever again. Since then, she set two Guinness World Records for various paddling events, started a non-profit, and continues to fight fires.
A true sign of an empowered woman is having the ability to uplift the women around her. Robyn made this her life’s work when she started Project Athena, a non-profit dedicated to helping women overcome setbacks through adventure challenges. CNN named her a CNN Hero for using her own resilience to support other women’s recoveries.
Molly Bloom
Molly Bloom is yet another audacious woman, as anyone who saw Molly’s Game would agree. Most of you have seen her journey from executive assistant. to running the largest and most elite underground poker game in the nation. The seats at her poker table were filled by A-list actors and professional athletes like Toby Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, and A-Rod. Molly didn’t just make her way into the boy’s club, she ran it.
She created the most desirable experience on the market for her essentially all-male clientele. And after it was broken up by the feds and everything seemed lost, she turned her life around with her book, movie, and speaking career.
Oh, and all of this came after she almost made the USA Olympic downhill ski team, before an injury took her out.
Barb Stegemann
Barb Stegemann is a socially good entrepreneur who uses her perfume company, The 7 Virtues, to help farmers in war-torn—or environmentally impacted—countries rebuild. She has taken a stand alongside the farmers she works with against the drug trade, extortion of labor, violations of human rights, and even the Taliban. When she saw an injustice, she took on the responsibility of righting it.
Not only is she changing the world with her company, but she also speaks out about the male-dominated health and beauty industry. She encourages women to pursue careers in the field because having men control an industry mostly made for women makes no sense.
Tan Le
Tan Le is one of the greatest minds in technology with one of the most inspiring stories. Tan’s mother raised her and her sister in Australia as refugees after escaping Vietnam on a boat in the middle of the night. Tan believes it was her outsider’s perspective that allowed her to see the world differently enough to create her brainwear technology company Emotiv. Emotiv is a non-intrusive headset that reads brain waves and allows the wearer to control technology with their thoughts alone. Her technology has been used to allow a paraplegic to drive a Formula 1 race car, give a form of communication to a young woman who lost all motor skills after a car accident, provide aid in autism research, and bring Harry Potter’s Hogwarts sorting hat to life.
She has won numerous awards, including being named Young Australian of the Year in 1998, voted one of Australia’s 30 Most Successful Women Under 30, chosen by Fast Company as one of the Most Influential Women in Technology in 2010, and picked by Forbes for 50 Names You Need to Know in 2011.
Bethenny Frankel
Bethenny Frankel has transformed her liquor line Skinnygirl into a complete lifestyle brand. When she started off with her alcoholic beverages, she realized she was breaking into a male-dominated industry where most liquors were marketed to men. Although her pitches for Skinnygirl were met with rejection after rejection, she knew the value of her product and pushed forward.
Now Skinnygirl has turned into a lifestyle brand that encompasses alcohol, food, beverages, clothing, and self-help books. She’s earned herself a seat with the Sharks on ABC’s Shark Tank where she makes serious investments with aspiring entrepreneurs and their startups.
Natalie Nixon
Natalie Nixon is where art meets corporate structure. Her background in jazz influences her unique and creative adaptations to organizational change and company growth.
Dr. Natalie Nixon is a strategy, foresight and innovation expert. As president and founder of Figure 8 Thinking, LLC., she advises leaders on unique approaches for process transformation and leveraging creativity as an innovation resource to more rapidly achieve priority business goals. Natalie does this by applying her background in cultural anthropology, fashion, and service design.
Kim Perell
Kim Perell is an award-winning entrepreneur, bestselling author, CEO and angel investor with a passion for people, technology, and progress. She went from being laid off at 23 to becoming a multi-millionaire by the time she was 30 years old and selling her last company for $235 million in 2014.
When her digital marketing company was acquired by Amobee in 2008 she worked her way back up to the top and become Amobee’s CEO by 2010. Kim is also an investor in over 70 companies, 14 of which have been successfully acquired by some of the largest Fortune 500 companies including a billion-dollar IPO.
Kim is passionate about women in business and writes, speaks, and is interviewed regularly on leadership, marketing technology, and entrepreneurship. Her achievements as a leader and entrepreneur have been widely recognized and covered in the media, including profiles in The New York Times, CNN Money, and Forbes. Her professional honors include being named Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young and Entrepreneur of the Year by the National Association for Female Executives.
Carmen Simon
Dr. Carmen Simon brings neuroscience into the marketing and branding equation. After spending years studying how the brain works, Simon founded Memzy, a branding agency that uses the science of memory to create more effective campaigns.
Carmen has two doctorate degrees, one in instructional technology and another in cognitive psychology, and is a recognized expert in applying neuroscience to leadership, communication design, and customer engagement. Her most recent book, Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions, has been selected as one of the top books on persuasion.
Cynthia Johnson
Cynthia Johnson is a global entrepreneur, marketing professional, author and keynote speaker. She is Co-Founder at Bell +Ivy, a marketing and PR firm in Santa Monica, CA, and Las Vegas, NV. Previously, she was Partner & Director of Marketing for RankLab, a digital marketing agency listed in Inc. Magazine‘s Fastest Growing Private Companies in 2015. In July 2015, RankLab was acquired by American Addiction Centers.
She is an Advisory Board Member for The Millennium Alliance, a leading technology, business, and educational advisory firm serving Fortune 1000 C-Level executives. Basically, she’s the marketing guru who transforms companies with her branding expertise.
Cynthia was listed as one of top personal branding experts in 2017 by Entrepreneur, top 50 marketers on SnapChat by Mashable, top 12 Female Entrepreneurs that Inspire by Darling Magazine, and top 20 people in SEO by Guardian. She is a contributing columnist to Entrepreneur and has had work published in Forbes, TIME, and several other industry-specific and top-tier publications.
Lauren Templeton
Lauren Templeton is the founder and president of Templeton & Phillips Capital Management, LLC; a value investing boutique located in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The company is the general partner to the Global Maximum Pessimism Fund.
She is the founder and former president of the Southeastern Hedge Fund Association, Inc. based in Atlanta, Georgia. Templeton currently serves the on the Board of Trustees at the Baylor School, Board of Advisors for The Beacon Center of Tennessee and the Atlas Board of Overseers. Templeton is also an active member of Rotary International. She serves on the investment committee of Chattanooga Rotary Club 103 and the investment committee of The Rotary Foundation.
In the past, Templeton has served as President of the Atlanta Hedge Fund Roundtable and as the Director of the Galtere Institute: Finance for the Future Initiative at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Additionally, Templeton has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Memorial Hospital Foundation, a member of the Finance Advisory Board of the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, and also served on the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors. Templeton is also the co-author of, Investing the Templeton Way.
Jessica Welch is the Content Marketing Associate at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau, holding a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature and Anthropology from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Her business thought articles often appear on Business 2 Community, Born 2 Invest, and YF Entrepreneurs.
Have you heard of Perfect Fitness? You probably know their first best-selling product—the Perfect Pushup. Remember when we all used to do push-ups the old fashioned way, with our bare hands on the floor, before a push-up bar was developed to save our wrists from injury?
After the success of the Perfect Pushup, Perfect Fitness was at a crossroads. Despite having a successful product they were under siege. Lower-priced, copycat products were entering the market daily. The fitness segment they dominated was now in danger of being won over by cheaper brands.
Fortunately, Walmart wanted to feature the Perfect Pushup in all their stores. There was one catch. Walmart wanted a cheaper version of the Perfect Pushup and to be delivered in 90 days or they would promote a cheaper competitor’s product instead.
The founder of Perfect Fitness, Alden Mills, recounts in his new book Unstoppable Teams, he didn’t think long on that proposal. Saying no would mean losing a large market of buyers but saying yes presented him with a large and daunting challenge. He said yes and in a massive undertaking, he developed a prototype, manufactured it, and delivered it to Walmart stores—in under 90 days!
He was able to do this because he had learned the principles of leading high-performance teams, which he outlines in his new book.
Platform
Leading great teams all starts with the leader having control of his or her own platform. Mills says you cannot lead a great team unless you can first lead yourself. To lead yourself, you must focus on the only things within your control: your mental, emotional, and physical capabilities. You will also need great people.
Recruitment
Where do great teams come from? They come from hiring people with the complementary skills and strengths you need for your company. You not only need to know yourself well but also your company’s needs to employ these skills. This is why it’s important to connect with your teams.
Connect
In order to get your team to follow you, you must know the people that make them. You need to connect with them mentally and emotionally. This is done by building your credibility as a leader and showing it through consistent and committed behavior. If you do this, team members will trust you and be willing to follow you to achieve great results.
Achieve
To achieve results, you need to inspire people, assure them, and assess them. You must give people lofty goals to aspire to, evaluate their efforts as a team, and show your appreciation for what they do. When people have something to work for, feel fairly evaluated and appreciated, they will do more for you. But you can’t forget respect.
Respect
Mills says as a team leader, you reap what you sow. If you show respect to your team members, you’ll get respect from them. You’ll earn their respect by recognizing each person’s contribution to the team. The more you respect your teammates, the more they will be engaged. Another way to show your respect is to empower your team.
Empower
To achieve great things, you must empower your teammates. Ideas don’t come from the leader alone. They come from each member of the team. When you empower teammates to find solutions, you will get the best ideas.
If you want to learn more about how to lead teams, check out Mill’s book or contact BigSpeak to hire him for your next event.
If you’re a Harry Potter fan, get ready for your year to be made. If you’re not a Potter fan…you really should be. MIT Student Nataliya Kosmyna has created a real-life “Sorting Hat” from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series capable of reading your mind and judging your character enough to place you in your respective house.
The hat is based on technology developed by BigSpeak Exclusive Speaker Tan Le, who created a non-intrusive headset that reads brain waves. The technology was originally created and used by Le in 2011 for use in nonverbal control of tech, like moving an object on a computer screen by thinking about where you wanted it to go. Since then, the brainwear technology has been utilized by outside companies and research groups to do incredible things like allowing a paraplegic man to drive a Formula 1 race car, giving a form of communication to a young woman who is paraplegic and completely non-verbal, and making leaps in autism research.
Now, an MIT student has used Le’s technology to bring everyone’s favorite magical series to life. Kosmyna programed Le’s brainwear technology based off the bonus material Rowling put together on her digital Harry Potter news platform and entertainment site, Pottermore.com.
The brainwear Sorting Hat is able to read the brain waves of the person wearing it and determine the person’s house. During a series of questions, the device reads the brain’s reactions, judging for qualities, such as bravery, wisdom, power, and loyalty. It assesses the wearer’s personality traits and which house they align with to make the perfect Hogwarts house placement.
Kosmyna says she was placed in Gryffindor (Harry Potter’s house in the books), but she has a biased advantage since she knows how the sorting software works. She is still working on the final product of her Sorting Hat, but says soon it will be available to children (and adult-closeted Potterheads) everywhere.
Jessica Welch is the Content Marketing Associate at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau, holding a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature and Anthropology from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Her business thought articles often appear on Business 2 Community, Born 2 Invest, and YF Entrepreneurs.
Jade Simmons is the “No. 1 Maverick” of classical music. You don’t typically hear “maverick” paired with classical music, but with her innovations to the art there’s really no other way to describe her. Simmons spent years performing classical concert piano, but it wasn’t until she had a creative breakthrough that her career really took off. After her discovery, she reinvented the way the public interacts with classical music and expanded the boundaries to find an entirely new fan base.
She discovered the key to creating true innovation was to freely bring yourself into whatever you do. She remembers from her days playing classical concert piano, walking on stage, bowing, playing Bach or Beethoven, bowing again and exiting stage right. She was trained to believe the music was about replicating the songs exactly how the composer originally intended. She saw herself as a vehicle for their work, and less of an artist.
It wasn’t until she turned to her audience before one of her performances and simply said, “Hello” that everything changed. As she looked around at all the jaws dropping to the floor, she felt liberated. She knew this was the start of something amazing.
Once she broke the traditional structure of classical performances she knew she had tapped into an untouched universe of possibilities.
“Nobody knows what Bach would have wanted, and it’s safe to assume as an artist he would’ve have wanted all of us to put ourselves into the music.”
Simmons introduced electronic music to her classical performances, creating an entirely new genre of music. She began incorporating her life stories into her performances because she realized people were curious about how she bridged the gap from a structured classical performer to a new, hybrid rockstar.
Her talents and newfound voice have taken her across the US to the Chicago Sinfonietta in Symphony Hall, New York’s Town Hall and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She’s even performed at The White House and received the Sphinx Organization’s Medal of Excellence in a concert held at the US Supreme Court hosted by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
By adding in her own personal style to her art, instead of trying to conform to be something else, she created something everyone loves. Simmons believes if we stop fearing what people will think of our true selves and let every bit of us go and flow into what we do, that is when real creativity is born.
This is not limited to art; it applies to everything we do. Each company has their own standard practices and company culture that creates norms within a team. Everybody who works in an office has at one point stifled their opinion or idea because they fear rejection and it was easier to stick to business as usual. But no one was ever promoted for falling in line. Be the maverick your truly are and add your touch to the company. By leaving your personal mark on the company, you may just find success like Simmons.
Jessica Welch is the Content Marketing Associate at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau, holding a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature and Anthropology from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Her business thought articles often appear on Business 2 Community, Born 2 Invest, and YF Entrepreneurs.
“The world as we know it is coming to an end,” Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO at Zuora, told about 180 attendees at the 2019 PSNI Supersummit in Atlanta this week. “The idea of selling as many products as possible is going away.”
Sure, that sounds like an ominous, even Draconian, way to close out the two-day event, but it was more of a warning for those in the room who are still thinking about their businesses and their customers the same way as they always have—or the same way they did even five years ago.
It’s time to embrace what Tzuo has dubbed “the subscription economy.”
Would you rather…
Would you rather be like Amazon, which has one-to-one relationships with every one of its customers, or like Walmart, which focuses on driving you back to the store to buy more stuff but doesn’t worry about personalizing the experience for its customers?
Subscriptions “dominate our lives,” said Tzuo, from Netflix to Amazon Prime and even traveling to and from industry conferences by using Uber and Lyft rather than riding in a cab. “It’s about customers, not products. We have new expectations.
Our Commercial Integrator editors have been busy interviewing AV industry pros to find out what they see as the biggest trends in 2019. Find out which products are expected to grow, how integrators plan to increase revenue, and what shifts will most impact the industry this year. Download your copy today.
“The one-on-one relationship is redefining retail,” says Tzuo. “We’re in a new golden age of media. It’s not about buying DVDs or CDs today. It’s about entertainment. [Businesses] want to own the customer experience over time.
“There’s a moment when you go from the old way of shipping software to your customers to the new way of collecting information on them and being able to anticipate what they want and when they want it.
“If you’re selling products today and don’t think about the customer, you’re vulnerable,” he says.
Embrace the Subscription Economy
Forget about the mentality of coming up with a great product and selling it to as many channels as you can, said Tzuo at the 2019 PSNI Supersummit.
Business leaders today can’t get focused on quantity. They need to think more about the quality of the services they’re offering their customers.
Today, it’s about outcomes, customization and constant improvement, says Tzuo.
Here are a few questions you need to be asking to succeed in the subscription economy:
Who are my customers?
How do we know more about our customers?
What is the thing we do for our customers and how do you get a complete picture?
What are they doing right now?
What are their AV needs right now?
What are the projects they’re doing right now?
What are the budgets?
“You should know everything about their experience,” said Tzuo.
“All this information is collectible because we live in a digital world. If customers’ experiences are shifting, you have to think in a different way. It’s about services, not products.”
The subscription economy reshapes and refocuses marketing and finance departments too.
“It’s about delivering what customers want. Don’t try to price what you do today in a different way. Reinvent that as a service. You’re trying to drive constant interaction where you’re providing value to your customers.”
Rather than trying to build your customer database with contact information and titles, supplement it with their activity and figure out the role you can play in shaping that activity in the future, he says.
“Think of this way: a customer is someone on the other side of a transaction. A subscriber is someone you have a relationship with,” says Tzuo.
How much do you think a professional speaker is worth for your conference? Are you willing to invest $30K to bring in a speaker, maybe $20K? If you are thinking $5K or zero, are you really valuing your audience’s time?
Sure, you can always get a free speaker to speak at your conference. Local Toastmasters groups have tons of them. Lots of professors at local universities will speak for free too—they love the sound of their own voice and have all aced the “death by PowerPoint” seminars too. But will they bring value to your event?
Speakers Bureaus, like ours, advise clients that the people in the audience are smart, that their time is valuable and that a keynote speaker at your conference needs to not only be able to connect the dots and be inspirational, they also need to provide practical takeaways—to make it worth the organizations’ investment and lost time when people could be working.
Don’t believe me. Let’s do the math.
Conference Logistics
When you stage a conference, the speaker cost is usually one of the smallest line items of the day. The cost of the venue, the food, the AV company, etc. – all cost a substantial amount more than any keynote speaker.
Salary Loss
But what about lost salary for employees attending an event? If you take the salary cost of your audience (X people * $Y per average person day), with an audience of only 200 people, who earn an average of $60,000 per year, that’s $48,000 for the day in lost money.
Productivity Loss
If you consider the lost productivity (X people * $Y average production per person per day), then on a productivity or revenue basis, the average employee represents nearly $4,000 per day. ($1.3 million per year/226 workdays). Those same 200 people in the audience now represent $800,000 in lost productivity/revenue.
Total People Investment
For a 200 person conference, this represents about $850,000 investment in terms of lost salary and revenue. Now we start to understand that the time the audience is devoting to the event and why the speaker up on stage is valuable.
The ROI of a Professional Keynote Speaker
According to meetings imagined, a professional keynote speaker can increase the ROI of your event by boosting registration numbers, adding credibility to your event, and engaging attendees.
Registration Numbers
According to worldwide speakers group, speakers with name recognition cut down on the cost of advertising the event. MeetingsNet explains big-name speakers add social media buzz, and oftentimes give your conference free advertising through word of mouth.
For example, our company once worked with a major client who had the goal of selling 1,500 tickets to their annual event. After a few months of sales, they only sold 250 tickets. But after we announced a major keynote speaker—Steve Wozniak—ticket sales skyrocketed.
When we added on Mike Rowe, former host of Dirty Jobs, ticket sales surpassed the 1,500 goal. Finally, when the group added entertainers/speakers Vanilla Ice and Tone-Loc, the conference sold out. Adding keynote speakers definitely increased registration for a successful event.
Credibility
Professional keynote speakers not only add value to your current conference: they add credibility to your event. According to MeetingsNet, professional keynote speakers add value to future events by building up the reputation of your conference. And Worldwide speakers group adds, “well-known names tend to produce buzz surrounding the speech” which benefits the event year-round.
Increased Engagement
Professional keynote speakers also add value in terms of attendee engagement. Audiences are generally skeptical and they get offended easily, especially if an organization wastes their time with humdrum or “been there, done that” speakers.
Bringing in a vetted, professional and impactful speaker is the best way to engage with an audience, teach them new things and show them they are valued and respected. Great keynote speakers inspire attendees and increase productivity after the event.
According to Jon Petz, meeting planners may see keynote speaker ROI as a 1:1 measurement—covering a keynote speaker cost through registrations and sponsorships. However, professional speakers ideas and inspiration may increase productivity by several percentage points after the event. How’s that for ROI
Value to organization
In a white paper by Andree, Carlson, Crocco, and Sterling, a survey of event planners and executive officers found 92 percent were satisfied with their keynote speaker experience, 87 percent of clients found a return on investment from equal (a dollar for dollar return) to 5 times the cost of the speaker; and 65 percent said a speaker’s points were reinforced internally by leadership from 1–6 weeks or more after the event.
So when calculating the cost of a professional speaker, consider everything people have invested in the event, and what a big name speaker can bring in terms of registration, buzz, credibility, engagement, and change to your organization. When you consider those factors, a professional speaker makes a wise investment for a successful event.
Habits Expert and New York Times bestselling author of Atomic Habits, James Clear, is BigSpeak’s newest Exclusive Speaker. He has dedicated himself to answering one driving question–how can we live better?
All of his research has led him to create the science of habit forming and breaking and using habits to their greatest potential. He founded The Habits Academy which focuses on training oneself to take small actions that will have large impacts on your success in life. His bestselling book Atomic Habits helps you create systems where “good habits emerge naturally, and unwanted habits fade away.”
Atomic Habits has sold over 300,000 copies in the first 3 months, ranks on the New York Times list at #2 in Business and #5 in Advice/How-To. The book has made the New York Times bestseller’s list every month since it’s launch. Atomic Habits was also a finalist for Goodreads’ Best Nonfiction Book of the Year.
James doesn’t merely report the research of others. He tries out the concepts for himself as he experiments with building better habits as an entrepreneur, writer, and weightlifter. In the end, his talks end up being one-part storytelling, one-part academic research, and one-part personal experiment, forming a colorful blend of inspirational stories, academic science, and hard-earned wisdom.
His thought leadership regularly appears in the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Medium, and Time, and he is a regular guest for CBS This Morning. In addition, he helps millions of visitors each month through his website and hundreds of thousands subscribe through his popular email newsletter.
He is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies and his work has been used by teams in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Through his online course, The Habits Academy, Clear has taught more than 10,000 leaders, managers, coaches, and teachers how to improve.
In his keynote, Atomic Habits: How to Get 1% Better Everyday, Clear expands on the principles that propel successful habit-forming. The natural impulse is to attempt big steps to improve. However, taking big steps often results in failure or only temporary gains. You rarely see the permanent results you want. The key to successful change is in small habits.
James focuses on the science of small habits, how they work, and how their effects compound and multiply over time. Through research and personal stories, audiences will not only be entertained but also come away with practical strategies they can immediately apply in their personal and professional lives.
The content writers at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau are Experts on the Experts. They hold doctoral, masters, and bachelors’ degrees in business, writing, literature, and education. Their business thought pieces are published regularly in leading business publications. Working in close association with the top business, entrepreneur, and motivational speakers, BigSpeak content writers are at the forefront of industry trends and research.
Today, Google is a success story. But before Google/Alphabet took over our world as the gateway to search, the company didn’t have a solid plan for achieving its goal of information domination. Then John Doerr came along. The bestselling author of Measure What Matters helped change the course of Google’s trajectory by building inspiration and accountability into their value-driven goals.
As a venture capitalist and early investor in Google, Doerr had lots of experience with goal setting and accountability. He had worked with Intel in the early days, watched its growth explode, and learned a system for smart growth from Intel co-founder Andy Grove.
This is the same system Google, the Gates Foundation, and others use to achieve consistent results. Even U2s lead singer Bono uses this system as he aspires to achieve his world objectives of debt cancellation and access to HIV drugs for all.
The system goes by the acronym OKR (Objectives and Key Results) but this is not your father’s accountability system. Unlike other accounting and goal systems, OKR marries inspiration with how to measure its impact.
How Objectives and Key Results works
Experts like John Doerr, Felipe Castro, and Christina Wodtke have entire books, TED Talks, webinars and websites devoted to this topic, so this article will be brief. For a deeper dive on the philosophy or implementation, investigate their works. Doerr’s book is particularly good for the philosophy but Castro says that some of his examples can be misleading. But for now, I’ve borrowed freely from their ideas to help explain the O, the KR, and even an A, which is not part of the acronym.
O: Set inspiring objectives
In this goal system, your company sets an inspiring qualitative objective to attain. These objectives are aspirational and will stretch everyone. And most importantly, they are not quantitative. They are not things like 20% growth or getting 2 million users.
Instead, objectives concisely explain your company’s WHY. If you have read Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, objectives should touch on the reason your company exists. And your reason is not just to make profit. All companies do that (or strive to), but why does your company exist when so many others do similar things?
Inspirational objectives can be goals like delight customers or help more people around the world. Google’s objective in 2008 was to make the Internet as fast as flipping through a magazine, and Patagonia’s new objective in 2019 is to save our home planet.
KR: Choose key results that measure impact
Key results are numbers. These numbers measure the impact you are having on your objective. They are not to-do lists or tasks you check off. Results should be quantifiable, measurable, and meaningful. They show HOW you are reaching your inspiring objective in terms of numbers.
If your objective was to create an awesome customer experience, for example, you could measure it in a number of ways. You might use Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer acquisition, repurchase rates, or all three. But be careful with how many things you measure. No objective should have more than five key results or less than two.
A key result is usually stated like you’re making a good habit or SMART goal: it’s specific, timely, and measurable. Key results might look like this.
Improve NPS from X to Y
Increased repurchase rate from X to Y
Grow customer acquisition rate from X to Y.
A: Experiment with activities
Activities determine your WHAT in this system. Sometimes called Initiatives, they are what you, your team, and your company do to achieve your objective(s). Activities can be projects or tasks. Some might be done annually, and some might be quarterly. These activities tend to change as you find the right way to reach your objective.
If you’re trying to create a great customer experience, for example, you might try things like redesigning the customer journey on the website. You might develop a new customer service training program. But the impact of these activities will be shown in your key result numbers above. If the numbers don’t change in the way you want them to (up or down, depending), you’ll need to experiment with new or revised activities.
The OKR system is simple to summarize. The hard work comes in determining your WHY, HOW, and WHAT. And then being consistent in pursuing them and communicating them to your team and company. However, if you do it correctly, you might just have continued success like Google.
What kind of leader are you? Are you more like Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Tim Cook, or Jack Ma? That is to say, do you approach business like an artist, engineer, athlete, or sage?
Each of these entrepreneurs is a successful leader but each one succeeds with a different approach. While one is more of an idea person, the other uses more emotional intelligence. Their dominant mindset determines the way they lead, how they approach finding solutions, and how they interact in the workplace.
In a recent article “The Creative Power of Constructive Conflict,” the Dean of Innovation and keynote speaker Jeff DeGraff explains the four personality types and lays the groundwork for all leaders to adopt an ambidextrous mindset so they can engage in constructive conflict. Leaders who engage in constructive conflict are able to entertain diverse opinions (from mindsets different than their own), which leads to more innovative solutions for the organization.
Our fearless rejection expert, Jia Jiang, made a guest appearance on NBC’s Today Show to give Hoda Kotb, Carson Daly and Jenna Bush a lesson in being rejection-proof.
Jiang’s life used to be marred by rejection and judgement. He had dreams of being a successful entrepreneur, but felt hindered by the paralyzing fear of rejection. Then he took a chance, quit his well-paying job, started his own business despite his wife being pregnant, and worked for months while his personal savings dwindled only to be rejected for funding via text. It was a devastating blow. He wondered why he took the rejection so hard.
He wanted to break free from the grip of rejection, so he started a self-designed, 100 Day Rejection Challenge. Every day he would set himself to a task that would lead to rejection. He started by asking a total stranger for a $100 loan, and the tasks only got more outrageous from there—ranging from asking for a burger refill to driving a policeman’s car.
In his interview with Daly and Bush, watch as he dives into his biggest rejections, the success he found from these rejections, and how it all changed his world view.
The content writers at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau are Experts on the Experts. They hold doctoral, masters, and bachelors’ degrees in business, writing, literature, and education. Their business thought pieces are published regularly in leading business publications. Working in close association with the top business, entrepreneur, and motivational speakers, BigSpeak content writers are at the forefront of industry trends and research.
