Best Website; Ultimate Question; Good Profits; Australian Growth Summit Next Week
March 8, 2012
12 Greatest Entrepreneurs; The Advantage – Lencioni; Three People to Fire; Sad Story
March 22, 2012

Peter Diamandis; Abundance; TED Presentation; Most Admired Companies

"…keeping you great"

HEADLINES:  

Peter Diamandis — just signed on as the Celebrity CEO Keynote – FORTUNE Leadership Summit May 15 – 16, Atlanta. I'm stoked!

Perfect Entrepreneurs' Book — looking for great news about our future? Peter Diamandis, the famous founder and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation and space entrepreneur, just co-authored a smash hit called Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think which I devoured on my flight to Australia. This is exactly the research-based "juice" we need to counter all the negative news bombarding our brains. And his book is full of hundreds of concrete ideas that will impact every one of our industries and businesses – a credible look into the near future – stay informed!

TED, SXSW, Dell — Peter already has one of the most watched online presentations from the February TED conference – 16 minutes I plan to show my children during our Sunday family meeting. And I caught up with Peter between his South by Southwest conference keynote and a private presentation for Dell. With degrees in molecular biology and aerospace engineering from MIT and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, Peter has some serious horsepower upstairs! He's the co-founder and Chairman of Singularity University with inventor Ray Kurzweil, and co-founder of International Space University, besides founding more than a dozen space and high tech companies.

Four Emerging Forces — co-authored with Steven Kotler (bestselling author and science journalist), Abundance explores how four emerging forces are combining to solve our globe's biggest problems. These four forces:

  1. Exponential Technologies (infinite computing, 3D printing, robotics, digital medicine, AI, sensors, synthetic biology)
  2. The DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Innovator – Burt Rutan, Chris Anderson, etc.
  3. The Technophilanthropist – think Bill Gates, Jeff Skoll, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk
  4. The Rising Billion – the new middle class and a huge market

Surprisingly, many of the solutions already exist to solve our food, water, and energy challenges. And I didn't know we already have 3D printers that can "print" a small functioning kidney!

Celebrity CEO Keynote — anyway, I was so excited about his TED talk and book I immediately contacted Peter (thanks Joe Polish and Daniel Marcos for the hookup) this week to be the celebrity CEO keynote for the upcoming FORTUNE Leadership Summit with Jim Collins – and he agreed!!! I couldn't be more thrilled. Book club members will be getting TWO copies of his book (I want you to give one to a friend or family member) next week. Here's a link to order from Amazon for everyone else.

Most Admired Companies — FORTUNE published their latest list of the Most Admired Companies and Apple topped the list for the fifth straight year. Apple also set a new market cap record of $530 billion this week! Google, Amazon, Coca-Cola, IBM, FedEx, Berkshire Hathaway, Starbucks, P&G, and Southwest Airlines rounded out the top 10. Here's a link to the entire list.

Crowdfund Investing Update — now it's time to call YOUR Senator – looks like the JOBS bill is coming to the Senate floor for a vote. Your phone calls are making a difference – and several of you have reported back that the staff of the Senators seemed to be attentive. Lon Bason, Director of Sales, Mar-Key Media, sent this link to an excellent overview article in Forbes entitled "Why Crowdfund Investing Is The Path To Economic Recovery." And here's a crowdfunding 101 primer. Please make those calls.

Verne Harnish
Verne Harnish
Verne Harnish is founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and chaired for fifteen years EO’s premiere CEO program, the “Birthing of Giants” and WEO’s “Advanced Business” executive program both held at MIT. Founder and CEO of Gazelles, a global executive education and coaching company with over 150 coaching partners on six continents, Verne has spent the past three decades helping companies scale-up. The “Growth Guy” syndicated columnist, he’s also the Venture columnist for FORTUNE magazine. He’s the author of Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0); Mastering the Rockefeller Habits; and along with the editors of Fortune, authored The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times," for which Jim Collins wrote the foreword. Verne also chairs FORTUNE Magazine’s annual Leadership and Growth Summits and serves on several boards including chairman of The Riordan Clinic and the newly launched Geoversity. He is an investor in many scale-ups. A father of four, he enjoys piano, tennis, and magic as a card-carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.