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OCT 1st 2014: Getting More Done With Less Work

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Avoid the unrecognized costs of technology innovation culture.

This discussion led by Dr. Greg Marcus is on whether long work hours are necessary for a better end product and if the longer hours are desirable. While working longer hours people often make more mistakes as their minds are not in top form due to fatigue. This workshop hopes to help business owners and workers alike create a healthier work environment.

The Paradox of Silicon Valley: The very culture that spawned some of the greatest technological innovations in history has come at an unrecognized human cost. Many of the people powering the engine of innovation have developed a single-minded focus on their work, leading to long hours, strained relationships/alienation from people closest to them, health issues, spiritual angst…On the business side, there is introvertible evidence that overworked people have lower creativity, make more mistakes, and have more health issues, and a higher turnover rate.

The October roundtable discussion will examine whether long hours are necessary or desirable when attempting to achieve spectacular results. 

High performance requires both inernal and external balance.  Balance is best achieved through integration, not just juggling incoming requests, and integration presumes some proficiency at context management. Are you the one managing your context or are you allowing some other party with perhaps different priorities than yours to manage your context? The speed of Silicon Valley can cascade complexities more rapidly than individuals can process; Having some complexity processing skills can help.

SVII is returning to Angelica’s in Redwood City for this highly interactive session. Angelica’s extensive renovation has taken this already excellent venue up several notches to provide a very classy place for compelling dialog to occur accompanied by fine food and drinks. Join us for the first program of SVII’s fall season.

Event will take place October 1 at 6:30 PM (1st Wednesday) at: 

Angelica’s Restaurant 

863 Main Street

Redwood City CA

Appetizers will be provided; No host dinner and drinks will be available (and encouraged!)

Pre-Registration Tickets ($15)  – On SALE Now!

PANELISTS:

DR. GREG MARCUS

Dr. Greg is a recovering workaholic who helps the chronically overworked work fewer hours while thriving in their career.  In the process, he transforms stressed out people ready to jump ship into highly productive leaders who want to stay.

Dr. Greg has a Ph.D. in biology from MIT, and worked for ten years as a successful marketer in Silicon Valley. At one point, he was working 90 hours a week, which impacted his health, family relationships, and job performance. Then, he made a discovery that allowed him to cut his hours by a third without changing jobs. The secret? He started putting people first.
Dr. Greg is the author of Busting Your Corporate Idol: Self-Help for the Chronically Overworked and the founder of the Idolbuster Coaching Institute.

HOWARD LIEBERMAN

Chairman SVII and CEO Clear Capital Management

Howard Lieberman is a global innovation guide, executive consultant and popular speaker addressing innovation audiences around the world. He has been the chairman of SVII, the Silicon Valley Innovation Institute, a 501c(3) California Corporation since 2005.

Howard and his team have been solving innovation problems, initiating and guiding execution of innovation-critical initiatives, and crossing internal and external resource boundaries in order to accelerate scalable innovation and unleash innovation potential for decades.

Mr. Lieberman exercised his innovation chops through 20 years at Bose, Apple and DARPA, all top-of-their-field, world-class innovation cultures. As a physicist and electrical engineer he founded several technology-based entrepreneurial enterprises, and as the Dean of Cogswell Polytechnical College he created their innovation management program in 2000. Developing that program lead to the formation of SVII five years later, and also Cogswell’s current MBA program in Innovation Entrepreneurship. SVII has presented over 100 innovation programs covering a very wide variety of topics, and has offices in Massachusetts, New York and Silicon Valley. He is also the CEO of Clear Capital Management whose proprietary algorithms changed the curve relating ROI and Risk to outperform the market while simultaneously protecting assets through far greater due diligence rigor.

As an involuntary innovator and energetic multi-instrumentalist, Howard has also found the time to perform over 1000 times in the last 30 years as a jazz artist. And as an electro-acoustician Howard has also managed to professionally combine music and technology to pioneer multi-billion dollar markets.

BERNARD MONT-REYNAUD 

Extensive R&D experience in academia and industry: algorithm designer at large, with many specialties. Exploring systems with users (front), deep domains (back), challenging computations (middle). To keep getting better at it and have fun along the way.

Specialties:Designing and implementing fast algorithms to solve problems in real-time systems, search, graphs, optimization, media processing, professional audio editing, auditory modeling, tracking and source separation, dynamic probabilistic networks, media indexing, search engines.

After he graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, France, Bernard Mont-Reynaud did research at INRIA, then left for Stanford University where he obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science; his advisor was Prof. Don Knuth. He taught CS at UC Berkeley, until called to join research in music analysis at CCRMA. The analysis, visualization and perception of music and audio have been major themes of his work over the years, along with image processing, real-time systems and advanced UI design. Places he has worked include Lucasfilm, TDW, Xerox PARC, Studer Editech and FXPAL. He was also the Chief Software Architect at Sony’s “Super Audio Project” R&D facility in San Francisco. Dr. Mt-Reynaud is also an accomplished painter and musician.

MJ MONT-REYNAUD

Independent Documentary Filmmaker and Photographer

I am a lover of documentary film. I love telling stories and learning about the world through them. 

My work has generally focused on social issues, broadly speaking. My first film, My Mountain, was about rural Haiti, where I spent 5 summers and first discovered documentary film and photography. I have since been learning how to use these media for social causes via short form and long form film, non-profit and commercial work.

I also enjoy using film and photography as a means of expressing love. In that vein, I have made short films and photo montages for weddings, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, family reunions and the like. 

 

DARIUS DUNLAP

Darius is fascinated by technology that shapes our world, and by the connections it enables between people as they create and learn. He has a strong business foundation in international operations and management, product and service definition, and global business development as well as deep technical knowledge in internet technologies and across the hardware and software of computing systems from supercomputers to mobile devices.

Darius is a mentor to startup teams and an advisor to startup incubators, universities, growing companies and large enterprises around the world. He leads workshops on Customer-Focused Product Definition and Development, Innovation Management, the [LUXr method](http://luxr.co) for [Lean Startups](http://theleanstartup.com/), Business Model Analysis and Strategy using variations of the [Business Model Canvas](http://businessmodelgeneration.com), Innovation in Service Operations, Innovation in the Enterprise, as well as custom-developed programs.

Pre-Registration Tickets ($15)  – On SALE Now!

MAR 5th 2014: How Are Trade Shows Relevant to Innovators?

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Are trade shows being overshadowed by the internet? Or do they still hold some value in networking?  Trade shows are important to industries because of the interactions that take place within them, not only connecting people to a product, but to networks as well.

Some industry watchers  and writers have suggested that the trade show is dead. The notable absence of industry titans like Apple, Google, Microsoft and HP at this year’s CES would seem to support this. In a world where the convenience, ease and cost savings of the Internet increasingly dominate purchasing, and even professional associations, of what use are trade shows and industry conventions?

The bottom line is innovators still have to live in reality, in order to activate their insights. Although virtual reality can be exciting, informative and entertaining, it is still a second hand augmented view of business reality. Tradeshows are the ultimate batch processing of reality, where a less varnished view of the truth can be poked at in person and in real time. Reality can be interactively tested using all of your senses.

 Perhaps this is why this year’s CES saw record attendance and volume of exhibit space, and venues like the Moscone Center are booked nearly every week with some industry event. In the case of CES, over 160,000 people committed some portion or all of a week of their time and excess of $1000.00 to explore close to 2 million square feet of exhibition space.

As innovators, you need to understand your product, customers, market, industry, competition, customers, colleagues, collaborators  and the relationships between all of these in addition to your insight or technology. It takes all of your energy and senses to do this accurately and you also need practice transmitting this understanding in-person to be credible. A trade show is a rapid calibration forum where an in-person interactive demo allows you to ask questions, try things out and observe the facial expressions of those around you to use your judgement about what is real, what is almost real and what is just plain false. In addition, it can be very valuable to witness CEOs’ keynotes and presentations.

On Wednesday, March 5th, the SVII Society meeting will explore the significance and future of trade shows and industry conventions as well as how to get the most out of how to attend them if you are an innovator. Plan to join us for an evening of lively, potent dialogue.

This event will take place at 7PM at:

Hangen Szechuan Restaurant (2nd Fl), 134 Castro St, Mountain View, CA 94041

Dinner will be served!

Pre-Registration Tickets ($20)  – On SALE Now!

PANELISTS:

Janet Rae-Dupree
Science, Technology and Innovation Writer
janet@raedupree.com

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for her part in coverage of the Los Angeles riots, Janet Rae-Dupree has covered innovation, science and emerging technologies since 1993. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, BusinessWeek, the San Jose Mercury News. Author of “The Anatomy & Physiology Workbook for Dummies,” Rae-Dupree excels at explaining complex subjects to lay audiences.

As a Stanford Knight Fellow in 2006, she studied innovation and how the process of moving a new concept from development into the marketplace alters that innovation’s future roles. That study led to development of a monthly New York Times Sunday Business column, “Unboxed,” addressing innovation and creativity in corporate America. Her columns were frequently among the top-ranked reads on the Times’ site for weeks after initial publication. A passion for all things sci-tech has led to articles about everything from nanotechnology and biotechnology to clean energy and medical devices. Lately she has been focusing on virtual education and how technology is transforming what we can accomplish with our minds and bodies.

MAX SIMS
Principal, Technolution
max@technolution.com

Max Sims has had an extensive career in design, business and computer graphics. Originally a car designer at GM and Renault in Europe, he applied his industrial design skills to work on movie special effects for the films Beetlejuice and Masters of the Universe. He began his computer aided industrial design software career at Alias Research, and later became software product manager  at  think3. He has worked as the Director of 3D Production at Luuluu.com. Max was the lead writer on “Inside Maya 5”, a definitive 900-page book on short filmmaking, while simultaneously designing theNatus Algo 3i. The Natus medical device won industry awards for Medical excellence and branding. Sims has been an executive producer for virtual worlds in Spain, where he was also an Invited Professor at the University of Salamanca. Since earning his MFA in Design at California College of the Arts, he consults in design strategy in the field of electronic automotive user interfaces and branded design fiction experiences.

Robert Sloan
Chief Innovation Officer, Vevity
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 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.

CODY A. SMITH
Consultant, Deloitte Consulting, Positivity Inc. 
codysmith5@gmail.com

A born entrepreneur, Cody founded his first company with 7 employees from his parents’ garage at the age of 16. A relentlessly optimistic strategic thinker, he is deeply passionate about helping organizations and individuals discover their unique set of core strengths and learn how to use them. He is relentlessly curious and has a genuine love for exploring the world’s perspectives by getting to know new people. Since obtaining his masters, he has consulted for Deloitte for four years, the first first two years of which were spent traveling around the world helping clients understand better their risk of licensing intellectual property to the global marketplace. He considers this international growth experience to have altered his life in an extremely positive and open-minded way.

He is a believer in the transformative power of actively listening to others, and most recently served on the executive team of startup that orchestrated corporate culture transformations by providing life/relationship coaching to everyone as an employee benefit.

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

FEB 5th 2014: Real, Long-Term, Value-Added Innovation through Social Architecture

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All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get. Innovative organizations have social architecture designed to promote and support innovation.

In this discussion the relationship between social structure and innovative success is explored.

This February 5th SVII gathering is special – During dinner Founder and Chairman Howard Lieberman will be reporting on CES, reflecting on the state of innovation and the implications of the new technologies. The evening’s panel will take the game of innovation to a new level of purpose and contribution as four social architects share their insights on enabling organizations to multiply their ‘true-value-adding innovation’ – innovation that makes lasting, positive contributions to all impacted. Our panel will address two questions:

a)    What organizational design elements best support growing a culture of ‘true value-adding innovation?’

b)    How might existing organizations best go about growing such a culture?

Who should attend? The February 5th SVII gathering is intended for those organizational leaders, changemakers and practitioners who are intrigued with the possibility of multiplying their organization’s capacity to innovate — both in their products and services and in their social architecture.

This event will take place at 7PM at:

Hangen Szechuan Restaurant (2nd Fl), 134 Castro St, Mountain View, CA 94041

Dinner will be served!

Pre-Registration Tickets ($20)  – On SALE NOW!

PANELISTS:

BILL VELTROP
Co-founder & Senior Evolutionary Architect
Monterey Institute for Social Architecture & GlobalGEA.net

Email: bill@misa.ws  Phone: 831-462-1992

Bill is a senior social architect with extensive experience in the fields of organization design, learning and change. A pioneer in organic action-learning approaches to leadership development, he has designed and led numerous generative leadership learning expeditions. Bill’s professional background includes over 35 years of experience in leading innovative organization design and large-scale change implementations in the United States, Canada, Europe and the Far East, both as an internal at Exxon and later as an external consultant. Bill’s deep commitment is to the transformation of our social systems throughout our planet (education, health care, commerce, governance, media, etc.), in a way that best serves all life — for all time. His recent focus has been on helping corporations grow their system-wide capacities for distributed leadership, collaborative innovation, rapid learning and change.

 

MAX SHKUD
Co-founder & Social Architect
GlobalGEA.net

Email: max@globalgea.net

Max is a social architect and organizational innovator with extensive corporate experience in management, product development, and organization development and change. During his career at Snapfish and later HP, Max successfully led several large-scale, division-wide change initiatives focusing on business transformation and innovative organization design. In 2009, after completing an advanced degree in Organization Development at Pepperdine University, Max chose to dedicate himself to his deep passion for social architecture and generative organization design, which he considers his life’s work. In 2011, together with Bill Veltrop, he co-founded GlobalGEA and has since been co-developing highly generative, innovative approaches to organization learning and transformation.

PETER GAARN
Social architect
Monterey Institute for Social Architecture

Email: peter_gaarn@yahoo.com

Peter is a senior social architect with extensive experience in organizational design, organizational development, executive development/coaching, and strategic change management. Peter’s professional background includes over 33 years of experience in strategic change work, innovative organizational design, cultural transformation and executive development and coaching. Peter spent 25 year as an internal consultant/director at Hewlett Packard and Lockheed-Martin, and 8+ years as an independent consultant serving both profit and not for profit organizations. Peter has deep knowledge in high tech, manufacturing, education and most recently health care. In communities, he has worked at the intersection of local government, non-profits and educational institutions to improve and transform the systems and coordination between agencies to better serve their constituents. Peter is a co-founder of MISA, and has affiliations with The Piras Group and Sapience Networks (website currently not available).

 

STU WINBY
Founder, Spring Networks

Stu Winby is Founder of Spring Networks, an organization strategy and design firm and also Managing Partner of Innovation Point, a strategic innovation firm – both headquartered in the Silicon Valley. His focus over the last decade has been in healthcare and technology, working at the CEO, state and national level in healthcare innovation and transformation. His interests are in the design of dynamic networks as continuous innovation and productivity sources of advantage, and the management of innovation.

 

 

 

DEC 4th 2013: Innovation Vitality (Do you have the capacity to deliver on critical innovation initiatives?)

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What does it take to enact change in a stationary field? Innovation is difficult to enact anywhere, do you have what it takes? This discussion will touch upon what it takes to enact change on a larger scale.

It takes a lot of grit and determination to create and enter a new market, develop and apply a new process,  or do anything that is new and different. There is always resistance to change that needs to be overcome. Most individuals would also like to positively adapt to the situations they find themselves in, and all companies over time find themselves required to adapt to changing circumstances. Some of these circumstances are serious enough to demand a strong innovation response in order to keep the enterprise healthy or in some cases to even survive.

Although we frequently have excellent ideas about what to do in order to improve things,  they can be difficult to execute upon. The continued ability to operationalize insights can be called Innovation Vitality. This vital energy is what champions need to advocate innovation to all stakeholders including team, staff, colleagues, management and customers.

From this perspective, Innovation Vitality can be regarded as a measure of an organization’s capacity to launch and deliver on critical innovation initiatives. While innovation may occasionally occur without it, sustained innovation on the part of an individual, department or enterprise is generally directly proportional to innovation vitality.  As such, innovation vitality is an important, complex and multidimensional capability for any forward thinking entity.

Examples of Situations Requiring Critical Innovation Initiatives:

So how would you and your organization score on innovation vitality?

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Pre-Registration Tickets ($20)  – on SALE NOW!

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Come find out at the SVII Holiday (Christmas/New Year’s) Party this December 4th!

This will be a practical and interactive experience where we will each have a chance to perform a self-assessment using an Innovation Audit Questionnaire designed by Howard Lieberman, and currently used by organizations and their leaders around the world.

In addition, we will be bringing back some of your favorite panelists and innovators from 2013!  Keep checking back to see the updated roster (and don’t hesitate to send us requests).

This event will take place at 7PM at:

Hangen Szechuan Restaurant (2nd Fl), 134 Castro St, Mountain View, CA 94041

Dinner will be served!

Pre-Registration Tickets ($20)  – on SALE NOW!

(We will reconvene again with the first event of 2014 on Feb 5th)

PANELISTS:

HOWARD LIEBERMAN
Chairman, Senior Science and Technology Advisor 
SVII, DARPA, Apple Inc, Bose Corporation
After completing university programs in both Physics and Electrical Engineering, Howard spent fifteen years working for two large technology companies, Bose and Apple where he shipped more than a billion dollars of innovative products while taking Bose from analog to digital and Apple from computers into sound.He then spent a decade as a serial entrepreneur and a college dean and this last decade he has been applying these experiences as an innovator, innovation manager and innovation educator by founding and running the Silicon Valley Innovation Institute where he often finds himself functioning as an innovation articulator. He has also been an advanced technology procurement consultant to the US Air Force and is currently a Senior Science and Technology Advisor to DARPA, He is also active as a composer and performing jazz.
JUSTIN BAILEY
Vice President of Business Development
Double Fine Studios
Justin Bailey spent a dozen years in business development and strategic planning in the entertainment industry. During this career, Bailey has lead M&A initiatives, closed venture deals, setup crowd funding campaigns, and helped publishers make the transition from retail to digital distribution at Accenture, NAMCO BANDAI Games America, Perfect World Entertainment, and Double Fine Studios – where he currently presides over all business operations and is exploring how to effectively leverage crowd funding and crowd sourcing as a repeatable business practice.
BIRGITTE RASINE
Chief Evolution Officer
LUCITÀ Inc.
Birgitte Rasine serves as the Chief Evolution Officer (CEO) of LUCITÀ Inc., a hybrid design and communications firm. In line with her diverse media career that spans film production, journalism, publishing, marketing and technical writing, Birgitte has produced mobile apps and documentary films, written screenplays, funding proposals for NASA, and articles for Business Week, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, and worked in visual effects, camera and lighting on Hollywood and independent feature films for PDI/Dreamworks, ILM, Universal Studios, HBO, and Disney, whom she credits for giving her time in the trenches.
She is also a literary author, with several books to her name, including the novella “Verse in Arabic,” which was named a Finalist in the 2013 Press 53 Open Awards, Novella Category. She blogs regularly for The Write Practice, a community of over 95,000 monthly readers. Her web site is www.birgitterasine.com
Birgitte holds a BA in Film Aesthetics from Stanford University and studied cinematography at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles and international relations at the Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset in Madrid, Spain. She is a Founding Circle member of the Association of Women in Water, Energy and the Environment and sits on the board of directors of a non profit organization in New York City dedicated to supporting the leaders of tomorrow.
CHRISTOS CHRESTATOS
Director  / Cinematographer
Thoughtpusher
Christos Chrestatos is an experienced filmmaker and director, and founder of Thoughtpusher, a New York City based creative shop specializing in commercials, music videos, fashion films, and “hybrid advertising”.  His work has been featured in the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan, XLR8R (leading voice in independent electronic music for the US and many top international markets), RES Magazine (bi-monthly publication chronicling the best in cutting edge film, music, art, design and culture), as well as TV channels in countries like Japan, Canada, and Germany.  Christos draws his inspiration from a curiosity towards the human condition, his love for mythology, and an appetite to create meaning;  He believes strongly in the universal language of imagery (and its ability to resonate with individuals), as well as the power of the narrative in bridging the gaps of global culture.

JONATHAN BREMER
Mechanical Design Engineer, Thermal Systems
Tesla Motors
Bremer is currently working as a Mechanical Design Engineer at Tesla Motors. Curiosity has always driven him. After finishing his undergrad at Western Washington University in plastics and vehicle engineering he quit his job and dedicated himself to the WWU X-Prize Team.  The WWU X Prize team built a carbon fiber, monocoque hybrid super mileage car, from the ground up.  He was personally responsible for in car computer, interior and exterior LED lighting, display system, software integration, and the auto centering windshield wiper. Viking-45(WWU X Prize car) ranked 6th out of 121 competitors achieving an average of 112MPGe. Directly after the X Prize competition he was hired onto the Prototype Vehicle Group at  Tesla Motors. He spent a year developing the Toyota Rav4 EV and Tesla Model S prototypes. As the Model S left the prototype phase Bremer moved to the Vehicle Engineering Thermal Systems Team where he played an active role in the rapidly evolving company supporting manufacturing, quality and service along with his Thermal Team responsibilities.

When the surfing is bad, Bremer spends most of his free time playing with LEDs, flying his drone, and riding around his electric skateboard, if he’s not getting arrested trying to change laws. Battle for the beach http://vimeo.com/75373721,  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zach-weisberg/surfers-walk-in-martins-b_b_2663848.html. Projects and resume: http://theprojectportfolio.blogspot.com/

CODY A. SMITH
Consultant
Deloitte Consulting, Positivity Inc. 
Cody is a born entrepreneur.  He is deeply passionate about helping organizations find new frontiers in their overall culture,retain top talent and create healthier workplaces.   He is relentlessly curious and has a genuine love for exploring the world’s perspectives by getting to know new people. After obtaining his masters, he began consulting work forDeloitte.  He spent the first two years of his career traveling around the world helping clients understand better their risk of licensing intellectual property to the global marketplace.  He considers this international growth experience to have altered his life in an extremely positive and open-minded way.  He went on to spend 2 years atDeloitte Consulting in their Strategy & Operations practice where he helped executives of a Fortune 50 client spin-offhalf their business.

Cody is also an avid marathon runner and has competed in over 15 races around the world. His passion for running extends past participation as he has founded and organized a road race for charity.
(More Panelists TBA!)

Pre-Registration Tickets ($20)  – on SALE NOW!