I’ve met with people all around the world: from local mom-and-pop shop owners to politicians to Fortune 500 executives. I’ve presented to entrepreneurs and boards of directors, been flown on corporate jets, but one thing remains true in all my experience.
People do not know how to innovate.
So that is what I do. I help people and organizations become innovative. I don’t show them how do to be a little better; I show them how to be orders of magnitude better.
I am a business consultant, but like most titles that is a dubious distinction at best. I do high-level consulting in the business, design, and technology sectors, especially in the high-tech entrepreneur community (think Silicon Valley, Facebook, etc..).
My professional specialties lie in the areas of business intelligence and lean management. My academic specialization is in artificial intelligence. I spend most of my time these days researching and creating new opportunities and ventures in markets around the world.
For my résumé, click here. For more about my company, click here.
I am currently working on a unified model for analyzing, approaching, and predicting business as an empirical framework for studying and measuring innovation .
The following is a sample of some other projects I’ve completed:
Starting out in the business world, I was surprised to find that most companies did very poor work for their clients. I was just a novice and was already doing work better that most professionals. That didn’t seem right.
I realized soon enough that the problem wasn’t that companies were doing poor jobs; it was that few people were trained to do their jobs properly or cared enough to become better at their job.
I know if I had someone guide me and show me what to learn I could have learned everything I know now in a fraction of the time. So I work with students, professionals and entrepreneurs young and old, cultivating a culture of innovation and empowering them to change the world. I feel as if the greatest investment we can have in the world is to educate those around us so that they can one day do a better job than we ever could.
Technology runs the world. No matter what industry or profession you are in, you use technology to do your job and even outside your work to make your life better.
The term “technology” is such a vague and all-encompassing concept. Technologies these days are so interconnected that you cannot specialize in one without knowing anything about the rest because you miss out on too many crucial skill sets. To get the full breadth of knowledge, you have to borrow concepts from other areas (ex: traditional art students learning graphic design to get digital clients or web design to showcase their work online).
I rarely care “that” something is a certain way, I only wonder “why” it is that way. The answer to “why” rarely lies in one area of expertise. Quite often, the answer comes from a collision of many different areas. This interdisciplinary approach is naturally how my mind works and how I have been able to amass an ever-expanding diverse portfolio of expertise… as well as random trivia.
The notion of formal education often times makes me cringe. You see, in so many fields, it is the people with degrees that are often worse at their jobs. There seems to be this noticeable separation between getting a degree and truly developing yourself for whatever you are doing. People go to school to go to school. They don’t really learn, but rather, regurgitate.
Maybe that’s a problem with our education system; the fact that it creates a stressed-out work drone mentality where education is a burden you must bear instead of making people realize that it is the best vehicle for making their dreams come true. While I am currently getting a formal education, I don’t let that stop me from expanding my knowledge in other areas. Someone once said, “Never let school get in the way of your education.” I don’t think truer words have ever been spoken.
While still somewhat young, formal education has yet to provide me something particularly useful in my business life. I have taken a wealth of courses (undergrad, graduate, you name it), but it is only my personal pursuits that have elevated me to where I am today. I have been blessed with an analytical mind and an artistic eye, which allows me integrate the two worlds seamlessly.
All the professional skills I have acquired have been self-taught and my personal skills have come through years of life experiences most say I’m too young to have. There is so much to learn and it seems as if I have only reached the very beginning. I find myself saying that a lot.
