Author: Howard Lieberman

Of course, from my perspective, as an innovation guy, whatever situation is being faced, innovation is what you need to succeed in solving the problem. So much has been written about success and problem solving, that I am almost reluctant, but not quite, to throw a reframing of thoughts into the mix.  Below is a personalized view of what is needed for success from an involuntary innovators perspective.

There are multiple schools of thought attempting to address why some people succeed when others do not. Although many do not survive rigorous scrutiny, they are worth reviewing before debunking. First the 10,000 hour rule popularized most recently by Malcolm Gladwell, a terrific and accessible writer who sometimes has his words taken out of context by others. Gladwell’s excellent book Outliers, restates and references Dr. K. Anders Ericsson’s work. Some have diluted this work to simply state if you invest 10,000 hours you can be great at anything.  This is clearly not true and is not what either Gladwell or Ericsson have stated.  Putting in a lot of time is necessary but not sufficient.

This brings up the second popular school of thought that most unconsciously subscribe to, which blames or attributes success primarily to talent. Although individuals can be more or less gifted at various activities talent, genetic underpinnings have not been discovered. It is clear though that making progress is easier for some people than others, permitting them to progress more rapidly up the learning curve toward skill. Skill, however is not excellence or transcendent success. It takes a great deal of effort to get from talent to skill (perhaps the 10,000 hours?) but it also takes a great deal of effort (often more) to progress from skill to excellence.  This tends to imply that success may depend more upon investment of effort, than talent although some gifted or talented people do progress relatively more rapidly than those lacking it.

The third large school requiring a deeper look is the roles of generalized intelligence for leaders or coordination for athletes. It is widely assumed that great leaders have off the chart intelligence and great athletes have off the charts coordination or strength or some physical advantage.  Many great leaders did not exhibit any greatness early on.

Therefore, unfortunately it appears than neither time, talent, inherited intelligence or physical prowess are good predictors of success. Certainly they all help. who simply are “more”. Being more, which is different than having is also not a good predictor of success.

When we are not succeeding, and try to blame it on not having “more” time, talent, intelligence or coordination, this is simply an excuse to get us off the hook of not accomplishing as much as we think we want to, or should be.

I feel there is a not-so-secret weapon than can usually be applied. And that is conscious context management. All individuals have an enormous number of inputs impinging upon our systems. The universe we live in is so vast, of such great dimension and so dynamic as to literally be bombarding us with infinity all of the time. We can not step into the same universe two days or even moments in a row, and are therefore constantly involved in the dance of adapting and coping with something too gigantic too cope with, unless we find ways to shrink what we have to be paying attention to.

By the way, those gifted individuals with “more” sensitivity, awareness or intelligence can also have a “more” difficult time dealing with reality, because they sometimes attempt to process far “more” of what is happening than those who have found suitable blinders to limit what they have to cope with.  For those who are fortunate enough to know what they want to be while they are still children, to enter single profession, to have a single life partner relationship and to live in a single physical locale, life can be less overwhelming than for those who can not assume any of these focusing blinders. Those who change careers, partners, living situations, locations and more can be investing huge amounts of energy processing variables all of the time.

I am not making a value judgement here, saying it is better to live in a larger, smaller, more variable or more fixed world. I am offering  an explanation for why neither time, talent or generalized superior genes can guarantee success.

This does not mean there is nothing that can radically increase ones odds of success, for there is.  It has had many names and descriptions over time. Napoleon Hill calls it definiteness of purpose in Think and Grown Rich, a book resulting from interviewing  Andrew Carnegie about success in 1908. Long before this, greek philosophers described knowing yourself as the critical highest priority to get anywhere. Numerous self help books over the ages derived from psychological research say it in multiple ways, which I will paraphrase here as clarity of intention. To my mind, these are all forms of context managment which are excellent coping mechanisms to deal with the infinite number of inputs each of us receive every second of every day.

There is no question that consciously managing which part of infinity, one should bother to respond to, can reduce distractions which can destroy an individuals ability to succeed. The magic bullet I am putting forth here, is that the ability to consciously manage ones context is more powerful than investing 10,000 hours and being born with specialized or generalized proclivities. We all know many talented brilliant individuals having a hard time of it, and we also all know individuals who seem far less gifted but far more successful than one would predict. These resource investments have to be purposeful and consciously supportive of specific goals.

This does not only apply to individuals but also to companies, countries and institutions. I would like to support this with three personal examples – two from business and one from academia.

I spent ten years at Bose Corporation form 1980 to 1990 during which it grew form roughly $30M per year to $1B per year in revenue. During this same time another excellent audio company, JBL grew from $120M to $220M per year of revenue. The comparison was very stark JBL less than doubled in the same time Bose grew by a factor of over 30. As an aside, I personally preferred the sound of JBL speakers to those we created at Bose during those years even though I was a loyal Bose employee. This mystery was worth pondering. I believe the reason was because the founder Amar G. Bose and the corporate culture he consciously and carefully created was far more conscious of the design process than JBL. It is not that the Bose engineers were better or that Amar Bose was more brilliant than Sidney Harmon, the founder of Harman Kardon the parent company which owned and directed JBL. Many of both companies employees knew and respected each other.  I personally spent time with both Amar Bose and Sidney Harmon. The difference was Bose was a systems engineer with a passionate desire to understand and to communicate how audio systems worked, and that he developed a like minded culture tremendously focused on understanding through research precisely how and why each part of a system contributes to performance of a product. We quantified quality, and had a complex set of models to explain to the best of our knowledge, how all of the dimensions of the situation interacted. These included design, manufacturing, marketing, sales, economics, acoustics, signal processing and more. This was how Bose became worth more than the other several hundred audio companies in the world. We had a more clearly defined purpose and a set of models that were consciously shared.

I also spent several years as part of Apple Computer and it’s community where there too was a clear conscious intention. The goal was to Create Bicycles for the Mind as opposed to empowering IT managers, which the rest of the computer world was pursuing. The desire to empower individuals and do it in an emotionally relevant manner ultimately resulted in Apple being worth more than all of the computer companies in the world as well. Were the engineers smarter than all of the others? I do not think so. Off course this was a very select group, but so was HP,IBM, Intel and lots of other companies at the time. When Apple faltered and almost fell apart it was because the conscious model as manifested by the founder Steve Jobs was no longer being reinforced, because he had been fired (for cause by the way).

A third personal example, contrats two organizations founded over a century ago in California, where the superior conscious model tremendously outperformed the competition. This time I was part of a team which did not evolve to become one of the top centers of excellence in education in the world.  Stanford University founded in 1895, and Cogswell Polytechnical College (where I was a dean) founded 1887 were both founded with roughly a $1M endowment but extremely different missions.  Stanford was founded to create the highest grade of cultivation and enlargement of the mind; and Cogswell was founded to provide a technical education accessible to all boys and girls to create tomorrows workforce. They each achieved their mission! Some Cogswell graduates ended up working at NASA and many Stanford graduates ended up contributing to the apex of intellectual accomplishment.  The difference in value of these two institutions today is so vast that one is known worldwide and the other only in Silicon Valley.

I personally spent close to twenty years working within these three cultures, which exemplify differences choices of clarity of intention taught me how powerful conscious models and contexts can be. It was not time, money, or talent that had the dominant impact. It was the founder provided context, continued by the culture which made the largest difference. This is a simplification but we do all face similar decisions every day and every moment. When we are choosing and reinforcing a conscious context, then we are less overwhelmed by choices or distractions, and increase our chances of success.

For this reason, I encourage creative innovative individuals, to consciously choose frameworks consistent with who they think they are underneath and who they want to be, because this can guide every moment from that point forward. Being a guided missile is much better than being an unguided missile for everyone involved, when trying to make it in the world.

In the summer of 2017, when this is being written, Elon Musk is manifesting in his three companies an interrelated clear conscious vision. Not necessarily precisely how he will get there, but where he wants to get. He is outperforming entities with vastly greater resources (time, money and talent) by having a superior conscious framework model and vision.

Do not rely upon talent, wealth and time to get you where you want to go. Know where you want to go and be obsessed enough with a vision, to filter out the infinite number of distractions impinging upon you at every moment. This can not guarantee success, but all other things being equal (like talent, time and resources), to my mind, it is a far better predictor of success.

Join SVII in our exploration of Context/Cognition Mutuality. We are seeking to better understand how Context and Cognition impact each other and will be asking for your stories, insights and theories. Stay tuned for more details or contact SVII Chair Howard Lieberman.

Why are we doing this?

Cognition is incredibly important, expressing the line between conscious and unconscious awareness as the primary mechanism by which information enters our minds. As we are far more conscious when we are engaged, and far more engaged what impinges upon us is relevant to us.

Context is also incredibly important as it determines relevancy which we prefer to believe is based upon rational processes but may be be far more emotional than logical. What may be less obvious is extent of the mutuality of context and cognition as they each modulate the other. In other words context impacts cognition but cognition also informs context.

In case you are wondering what this has to do with innovation?

Innovators are Context Activists. They are not necessarily willing to accept the context they find themselves within all of the time. They are often motivated to question conditions as they have the belief that they can change them. Innovators are not passive when it comes to context. They do not ignore it as they have to become great context managers to get any of their innovations adopted. This is a good place to remind us SVII defines Innovation as Applied Insight.

You can not apply insights by being unconscious of conditions and people surrounding you. The best innovators are finely attuned to the micro-gestures of their audiences so they can constantly adjust what they say as a function of who they are addressing in order to increase cognition to the point of being actionable. If you can not make anyone cognizant of your insight it will not likely be adopted and you will not make it as an innovator.

Liberal artists innovate in our digital age when they combine perspectives broader than liberal arts.

Interconnected Breakthrough Innovation Dimensions 

Each dimension is unbounded and takes unanticipated paths.

Innovation

Innovation = Applied Insight. If there is no insight, it is not innovation. If it is only thought about, it is also not innovation. Ideas take a fraction of a second to have. Ideas are not inventions and in and of themselves, not innovations. Insights have to be applied in the real world in order to be innovations. You have to make it actually happen, not just talk about it. But Innovation can be relativistic – meaning time, location and situation dependent. In other words if many individuals in one circumstance are aware of something but no one has yet applied it in another field it can still be innovation. Creative people cross domains and escaping their silos do this a lot.

Digital Age

Like it or not we now live in a digital age creating both danger and opportunity. Many jobs, businesses and business models are becoming obsolete. Many previously lucrative professions are in free fall. Their practitioners For example recording engineers and musicians are searching for and creating new business models.  Old notions of leadership are under attack.  Assumptions that the person in the front of the room knows more than everyone else present is harder to defend in light of new rates of publishing combined with ubiquitous access.Today it is impossible to know everything about a single topic. What does this mean to political, business and educational leaders? Sharing knowledge is winning out over hoarding it. More nodes in your network grants more power than more secrets.  Leadership models and styles are changing right now.

Entrepreneurs

Historically, everyone was an entrepreneur. The majority of the human race, for the majority of history was self employed. They had to find and satisfy their customers because there was no one to take care of them. For a few decades in the latter half of the twentieth century people in western society had cradle to grave coverage in the form of a job that lasted for life. In today’s world of increasing physical and professional mobility and decreasing loyalty, almost all new job growth comes from entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. Large enterprises now gain innovation through acquisition, causing creative people to have a good chance ending up self employed. For all but a few decades it is not so much a new world as a return to the old one.

Collaboration Tools

The ability to co-create having teams simultaneously work on documents and media rich projects, is coming on very quickly. Professionals in Silicon Valley now regard email and texting as inefficient, searching through email chains to find documents is very frustrating. But the plethora of collaboration tools, cloud storage locations, USB memory sticks and file formats, not to mention multiple computers and operating systems, can make it incredibly hard to find things the old way. One can not take for granted how we will be collaborating in the future – the available options are changing incredibly rapidly.

Intellectual Property

The historical origin of this very important category was the notion that an idea can be a valuable property. The ability to be granted a temporary monopoly to practice an idea is a dominant reason the United States has become the most powerful economic, military and intellectual force in the world. However the USPTO, the agency which grants these rights, is not able to keep up with the incredible task of intelligently prosecuting the flood of applications. The result is many young inventors no longer file patents. They reason as it can take up to five years to get patents issued, they will likely have either already made it, or be out of business before then. However, the filing process requires applications be published disclosing inventions before they are protected. Collaboration also confuses who owns what. This gnarly set of problems is exacerbated by low government wages failing to retain competent patent examiners on the payroll. Patents cover invention work products. Copyrights pertain to authorship work products, which all of you regularly engage in. Add in trademarks and trade secrets, and most creative people are doing some sort of IP dance. The IP concept is ideas have value which can be monetized gives rise to our digital age as an idea economy.

Moore’s Law

Simply stated: Semiconductor costs are cut in half every year. Computer power an individual can access has grown astronomically. In 1983 I had to appear before the capital committee of Bose Corporation, to get permission to upgrade the single computer shared by the entire engineering department which had 64 kilobytes. Adding a second 64 kbytes of memory cost $20,000. Today 64 Gigabytes is $20, a billion times lower cost. Applying this to cars is amusing: current automobiles can cross the United States with ten tanks of gas but imagine a car that could cross the country thousands of times on a thimble of gas. Moore’s Law is not a law of science – it is a law of intention. There are no underlying physical reasons for this law to be true. Moore’s Law signifies what humanity can do when applying a collective mind and this is why Silicon Valley is the largest economic engine in the world, why Tesla has a $30B market cap, compared to GM’s $52B. Apple yesterday was worth $623B. Apple is worth twelve times more than GM. Moore’s Law moves us from a zero sum game into an abundance model.

Democratization

In 1975, to analyze 20 milliseconds of a sound wave it used to take 20 minutes using a $2M computer.  Analyzing one minute of sound would take 60,000 minutes or 1000 hours and a grant from the NSF to afford the computer. Forty years later, today, the lowest cost smart phone does it in real time.  A $150 phone today is 60,000 times faster than a $2M computer was when I was in grad school and it is a few ounces in your pocket instead of hundreds of pounds in an air-conditioned 200 square-foot room.  The accessibility is hundreds of trillions of times greater!

This exemplifies the democratization of technology, but what is less obvious is how this democratizes not only computing, but information access and ultimately of decision-making. Each individual can perform their own research on their own projects without needing to get permission or grants from anyone. The 6.8 billion cell phone subscribers in 2014 is up from 6 Billion in 2012, when for the first time more people had access to a cell phone than to a toilet. This incredible democratization of everything permits the entire human race to triangulate on the truth, ultimately paving the way to global democracy and making it much more difficult for oppressive regimes to persist for the first time in human history.

Media and Content

The birth of the “prosumer” and desktop publishing, two phrases coined at Apple when introducing the laser printer, refer to people who produce content for their own consumption, began a massive change away from all content and all media being created and distributed by a small, centralized minority, to literally everyone. Anyone in this room right now can learn to create a blog, a website, a newsletter, a podcast, a movie, original music and almost whatever else you imagine.

Quality does not come in an instant, but you could do any of the above at some level in an afternoon, perhaps without even spending a dollar. You may already have all of the capability in your briefcase, daypack or home on your desk. You can even do a multi-camera shoot using your phone, computer and tablet, and then fairly easily edit it to  point where you could share it with others and enter into a rapid improvement iteration feedback loop. The number of forums, YouTube videos, tutorials about almost anything you could want to know is staggering, and costs range from absolutely free, to $100 dollars per month providing access to Lynda, MacProVideo, Ask Audio, and the complete software suites from Adobe andMicrosoft. For less than the cost of tuition for a single college course in a private school, one can access a large pile of apps that would have cost over $5000 a few years ago, and thousands of high quality video tutorials which you could not watch in thirty years.

Engineers

Engineers have built the infrastructure of todays world. They systematically, physically manifest what scientists postulate. Engineers need high quality inputs to produce results subordinate to humanities needs. Ambiguously communicated needs result in building the wrong things. There is a tremendous opportunity for classically educated individuals to act as translators, specifiers, articulators, communicators, arbiters and educators. Business is increasingly market driven instead of technology driven. This translates to a transfer of power away from technologists to those who can effectively communicate with them in ways that bridge technology to markets.

Liberal Arts

Classically trained individuals are valuable when able to bridge the needs of humanity and business. Specialists work for generalists. Rapidly accelerating change requires those with multiple perspectives and excellent communication skills to lead the way. Liberal artists who learn the globally unifying nomenclatures of business and technology increase their value. The ability to put oneself in another’s place with compassion, empathy, and sensitivity are more domains of the arts and sciences than engineering and business. Domain transcendence through education, experience and ability to authentically get along well with others, permit one to contribute value in any situation.

Original liberal arts education goals are extremely valuable in the long run, providing meaning in people’s lives. It is now acceptable to be a geek, to have the expertise to access information and experience. The world has been changed by geek-humanists, the technologists with soul and the business people with hearts. Learning provides opportunities to cross many boundaries.

Business Models

Business models are sets of mathematical relationships between the sets of variables which together can define a business. Business plans are models populated by numerical data substituted for the variables. Business models are equations and business plans include calculated values. Multiple business plans can be derived from each model model, in order to project profitability, valuation, and better understand the “What Ifs” one asks on the way to becoming a stakeholder. For a long car trip you could create a trip model spreadsheet reserving places to enter distance, miles per gallon, gas tank size and other costs. Filling in the numbers yields a trip plan.  Many entrepreneurs unconsciously confuse and cross, model – plan boundaries. Plans are to execute. Models are tools to create plans.

Barriers to Entry

The digital age lowers the barriers to entry to begin new projects, businesses and enterprises. Without renting and furnishing an office, hiring and outfitting assistants, paying for advertising, marketing or business planning, it is possible to just start working on your idea. Writers self publish, musicians self produce, and inventors outsource manufacturing. Tens of thousands of new companies are founded annually in Silicon Valley. Thousands of new restaurants open (and close) in New York every year. It costs much less to start a software company than to outfit a restaurant. Popup restaurants use resources they do not own to begin serving. This double edged sword of low barriers to entry exposes enterprises to more competition as well. Starting has become easier, but finishing is as hard as always. The key is to get into a reality feedback loop as quickly as possible to commence iteration. Few plans survive contact with reality. Model validation is faster and less expensive than proving your plan.

End User Voice

A serious conundrum: All business needs to solve customer problems to get paid. Asking what do you want? does not yield useful results because customers are unaware of what is possible. Henry Ford said if I asked people what they wanted – they would say a faster horse. The president of DEC the world’s largest minicomputer company thought two or three people would ever need a personal computer. Neither Ford nor Jobs asked that question, they asked, would you buy this?  Navigating toward the future is a tricky business, requiring much dialog between the market and the makers. It can be very difficult, expensive and time consuming to cultivate meaningful relationships with end users, contributing to countless hours of frustration we all face performing IT on our various devices. The liberal arts person can play a fantastic role being the voice of the end user, because they are now the market.

Business

Most employees of large businesses are not entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, with their different priorities, personalities and attention spans, can sometimes cross the business divide in both directions. Economies of scale belong to big business and agility belongs to small enterprises who determine what is next, before big business then scales it up. Big business is aware of the need to innovate or die. 88% of the companies that made the first Fortune 500 list in 1955 do not exist anymore. In 2013, 288 of the 1,000, largest American companies from 2003 remained. But to happily remain in big business, one usually must be subordinate to authority and also be politically savvy. Bureaucrats listen, but do not invent much, unlike innovators who have a hard time taking orders. Some people build up security before launching their own thing. Others who begin as self employed, become tired of constantly engaging risk. They happily enter the more sane secure ranks of larger enterprises and every level of in-between also exist as options.

Stewards of Humanity

Visiting great museums and libraries is terrific way to be reminded humanity creates fantastic results. Facing global warming, overpopulation, water shortages, nuclear accidents, and widespread atrocious behaviors can bring you down. The 24 hour hour news cycles prey upon our sense of well being, “reporting” just how bad things are everywhere all of the time. Evidence of wonderfulness, a bastion of liberal artists, can remind us why it is good to be human by preserving the best of our achievements. In a digital age, the majority of content is increasingly created and distributed online, which creates downward aesthetic pressure when originals are difficult if not impossible to discern. Have you ever looked at a web site to find what you viewed yesterday was gone forever? For those who go to Tanglewood – if you want to see a detailed description of the concert you attended two weeks, good luck finding it on the BSO Site. Open source wipes out professional editors and replaces them with lower common denominator writing. Yet having a12 megapixel camera in your phone with you all of the time beats toting around a ten pound camera bag full of lenses. It is also far more likely you will take a picture. The best camera is the one you have with you. Discrimination still requires making tradeoffs navigated by sensitive individuals who both respect old wonderful works and keep an eye out for new ones. There responsibility to be a steward of our best, defending and protecting it, is important because it can be lost, and indeed in some cases already has been.

Science

One large difference between science and most other dimensions delineated here, is the application of scientific method. Science at its best can be both wonderfully skeptical and objective. If results are not repeatable they are dismissed. For something to be true, it must be repeatedly verified by others. This system can also be abused, because bodies who pass judgement can become ossified rejecting new evidence about things they do not understand. Science as a belief system strives to be more objective than art. This is not a value judgement as we need both arts and sciences. As meaning is subjective, life would be barren without art. Life also does not work nearly as well without science. As liberal arts include sciences the responsibility for balancing between objective and subjective perspectives is a job for liberal artists. We do not have to choose between emotional relevancy and robust reliability. We have to balance the objective and subjective within ourselves as part of creating sustainable lives.

Summary

From an innovation perspective every living entity has to innovate or die. The Darwinian term is adapt. Whether we call it innovation, improvisation or adaptation, it is the same requirement. Our models are limited and our plans must change to cope with reality. We are both objective and subjective, fiscal and aesthetic, and we each lead and follow. We occupy a dimensionally vast universe. Our best hope of getting along within it, is to each dynamically adapt to reality as we perceive it. Annually innovators introduce tens of thousands of innovations to billions of people. Fortunately not everyone desires or expects to disruptively innovate as chaos would ensue. But everyone incrementally adapts and improvises daily to survive in our personal world which brushes up against all of the dimensions of the digital age partially described here.

Vitality, a positive attribute correlated with success can now sometimes be improved using technology. This program deals with two different aspects of how technology helps us physically – it can be used to improve our health and it can be used to improve our performance. The familiar Star Trek Tricorder is an extremely useful but fictional handheld device whose sensors permitted monitoring of vital signs and other physical conditions. Presently there are seven finalist groups converging on creating a Tricorder-like device, in part motivated by the $10M Qualcomm X-prize “to bring healthcare to the palm of your hand”. This prize, scheduled to be awarded January 27, 2016, is just one example of the application of technology to health – more are exploding across diverse fields from diabetes monitoring to telemedicine.

On the performance side of technology there is an explosion of everything from simple fitness bands to prosthetics and including embedded electronics in everything from racing boats to bicycles. Daily exercise, diet,medication regimes are all part of the huge integrated set of apps and operating system extensions being designed specifically to help us improve our wellness and performance.

Join us for a roundtable discussion Tuesday October 27th from 6 to 9 at the Foothill Tennis and Swim Club for an eye opening and sometimes mind blowing look at not only what is coming, but what is already here today. Humanity is right now in the process of currently transcending biological evolutionary timescales. And much of this is happening right here in what is still the epicenter of technology, Silicon Vally. What better place to talk about augmented physicality!

Doors Open: 6 PM

Program: 7 to 9 PM

Tickets at the Door are $30

Online Preregistration is $20

 

Our Three Roundtable Panel Members

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Elzbieta Holsztynska,    President, GeaMedica, Inc.,    elahol@gmail.com

Dr. Elzbieta Holsztynska (Ela) has over 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry (Warner-Lambert, later Pfizer), Cocensys , Athena Neurosciences (later Elan), and Rigel Pharmaceuticals).  Over her career, Dr. Holsztynska has contributed to discovery, development and global regulatory submission of multiple commercially marketed drug products.  As a leader of Drug Metabolism division, Ela has studied therapies for a variety of disease groups, including oncology, immunology and nervous system disorders.   Ela is a published author of multiple scientific papers and book chapters.  She holds a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Michigan, and continued post-doctoral research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.  At present she is working on exploring new venues for understanding and treating age-related diseases.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Sloan,  Chief Innovation Officer, Equate Health,     robert@vevity.com

As a life-long innovator, Robert has served in positions as diverse as chief innovation officer, mobile system architect, innovation architect, digital systems architect, and system designer at flagship companies and startups alike. Companies have included Equate Health,  Sun Microsystems, Compression Labs, Phillips, Luma, Scanadu and Vevity, producing products and services ranging from wireless medical devices, mobile medical monitoring and creating illuminating design. His most recent venture, Vevity, is focused on helping people live healthier longer.

He has served as a liaison between Philips Research and Philips Medical, helping launch ideas into market products. As a system architect he has designed and built the audio encoders for DirecTV, designed the audio/telephony subsystem for the SparcStation 1, and defined an audio chip which was built by Crystal Semiconductors and Analog Devices that is used in many multimedia applications.

A pragmatic thinker, Robert has in-depth knowledge of multimedia platforms and industry and maintains hands-on experience with hardware and software.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geeta Priya Arora,   Speaker, Author, CEO & Founder,     La’Vanya Ayurveda Healing & Wellness Center

Geeta Priyadarshni Arora is an Ayurveda and Yoga practitioner, life coach, author, media personality, motivational speaker and teaches people how to discover their hidden talents to tap into their limitless potential to express their highest fullest self. Her passion lies in serving others and empowering higher thinking and education in the quest for identity and balance in our technologically driven world.

Geeta earned an MBA degree while climbing a successful corporate ladder. After her divine healing experience, she decided to leave the fiercely competitive struggle for wealth and power to focus her energy on spiritual inner awakenings to reconnect the missing pieces between mind, body, heart and the higher self. Geeta completed her master’s degree in Ayurveda and incorporates the practice of meditation and yoga daily. She offers educational programs to help individuals find their true path with intention. She writes, travels, teaches about healing and being in service.

Website: www.geetapriyaarora.com