Coaching
Coaching For Students & Educators
They know those types of presentations don’t communicate but just throw information at them, and they already experience that every day at school. Students naturally want to question and interrogate a presenter who claims to be able to help prepare them be relevant and successful in their future. This requirement for Q&A happens to be Anton’s strength and is why it’s at the heart of his interaction with a class of students.
Educators understand that in our modern age, information has become a free commodity and can be accessed anywhere from the Internet. Therefore, memorizing information to just regurgitate on tests no longer has value in education. Einstein understood this almost a century ago when he noted: “Never memorize something that you can look up.” In the modern classroom, the true value of education should reside solely in how a student’s mind can be creatively engaged to search for current information, assimilate it and then transform it into something new. This ‘something new’ can be in the form of conceptual or physical end products. Then only the level and speed of this process should be graded. This is a creative process of learning how to do Thought Experiments, which is essentially the ability of being able to entertain a thought without excepting it. Aristotle understood this goal for education over 2000 years ago when he said: It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Yes, there are students that already have natural creative drive and will experiment to figure out how to further develop their own creativity. It's just a matter of how much stress, disruption and failure they'll endure before they succeed. But educators do not have the flexibility nor the liberty to put all other students through stress, disruption and failure. That’s why it’s critical for educators to understand creativity as a process. Because if as an educator you can’t explain what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you’re doing. Anton helps educators understand this process and gives guidance on what methods can be practically applied within their current curriculum that will be most productive in meeting the objective of developing a student’s creativity.
The Source Of Breakthrough Innovation wide edit for website
Students desire to understand what will make them relevant and successful in a future where technology is continually advancing and radically transforming society. They regard their future years of study, in preparation for their careers, as a time-investment and want confirmation that their investment will be justified. But students have exceptional BS meters and don’t want to hear well-polished TED talk presentations.
Coaching for Entrepreneurs and Corporate Teams
Entrepreneurs naturally have intense emotional and intuitive drives that they heavily rely on. This makes them feel like the bold and unconventional actions they’re taking will lead to success. But the reality is that those actions overwhelmingly lead to failure in a world full of risk and randomness. For example, over 75% of VC backed start-ups fail and that failure percentage is even higher for non-VC backed start-ups. Also depending on the year and field, anywhere from 70%- 95% of new product launches fail. So clearly emotion and intuition are pulling and pushing the entrepreneur in wrong directions. That’s because there is a hidden catch to using emotion and intuition for innovation that is understood by breakthrough innovators; successful innovation can only happen if the entrepreneur additionally develops a skill to use emotion and intuition as tools alongside their intelligence. Learning this skill has always been left to the chance of experience and/or natural ability. Hence the high failure of entrepreneurs. This skill, which is learned from the ITP online course, begins to shift the innovation paradigm from a high likelihood of failure to a high likelihood of success. But to complete that process the entrepreneur needs to go through the ITP Level Two for a stronger grasp of the concepts that will make the ITP even more potent.
Furthermore, Anton is himself an entrepreneur who has launched multimillion dollar companies. So he can additionally empower entrepreneurs with a high level-analysis of their company’s SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). Along with a high-level analysis of the company’s vision, strategy and tactics. At minimum, Anton’s coaching is risk mitigation for the time, money and energy the entrepreneur is putting into their company. But most likely, it will be a transformative experience that will alter the entrepreneur’s vision and the direction of the company itself.
Corporate Teams engage in safe and conventional thinking as the norm. This is because most individuals working in corporations are naturally disposed to this type of thinking. But it’s also due to corporate culture increasingly pulling and pushing on teams to cooperate under a unifying vision as the corporation grows. As well as mitigating the factors of risk and randomness across an expanding complexity of operations. The combination of all these factors always leads to a group-think mindset within corporate teams. Then corporations eventually fall victim to bad decisions, from the lowest to highest level, being made within a group-think mindset. For example, consulting firm McKinsey found that 72% of senior executives thought their companies made bad decisions more often than good decisions. These bad decisions lead to monetizable losses, because it doesn’t matter how effective and efficient corporate teams become if they’re doing the wrong thing. Eventually, group-think leads to corporate failure, no matter how successful the corporation has been in the past. Blame is then allocated to many reasons for that failure. But those are all symptoms. Group-thinking, in one form or another, is the core reason.
In order for corporations to become sustainably successful in the future, their teams must engage in the opposite of group-thinking, and that’s entrepreneurial thinking. That does not mean teams have to go full-tilt bold and unconventional. Corporate teams simply must become more independent and innovative in their thinking. But corporate leadership does not know how to enact this change while preserving team cooperation. Furthermore, group-think is so engrained within corporate teams that it persists, even if leadership does try to change it.
Only by teams using the ITP can group-think be eliminated while preserving cooperation under one vision. This is possible because the ITP empowers teams to continually update their strategies and tactics through successful brainstorming that supports the corporation’s vision. Anton can help integrate the ITP within the corporate team culture by outlining an effective roadmap for teams to follow.