Bold ideas, fresh perspectives, and practical advice that inspires creativity in business, helps people navigate complexity and uncertainty, and accelerates progress as you invent your future.
Make your next Conference, Town Hall/All Hands or Face to Face Corporate Event an overwhelming success – where people leave feeling they have discovered something about themselves and each other, looking at work and life with ‘fresh eyes’, and committed to real, sustainable change.
Steven Kowalski, Ph.D. brings a dynamic, motivational, and transformative message to teams and organizations: creativity is the fuel that powers innovation – and each of us has the potential to use that creativity to drive sustainable advantage, growth and profitability in our work – as well as to live a healthy, purpose-filled life.
Keynote Topics include:
Creativity in Business
Unleashing Creative License™
Co-Creating Value for Breakthrough Results
Check out Steven’s YouTube Channel for
additional video lectures and talks.
Great ideas for solving complex problems come from thinking differently, challenging the status quo, asking courageous questions and working with partners and allies in new ways. Inspire and motivate each other for breakthrough results with the Creativity in Business approach and tools.
In this interactive keynote session, Steven Kowalski, Ph.D., brings key practices from the revolutionary Creativity in Business approach developed by Michael Ray at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and delivered there for over 25 years.
Steven’s unique application of core Creativity in Business tools helps build sustainable innovation capability within leadership teams, departments, and across functional boundaries. Participants learn valuable skills for collaborating on business goals that require ingenuity, creativity, intelligent risk, and resilience.
Over the years, Steven has delivered this keynote to Research Scientists, Engineers, IT professionals, Project Managers, Project Team Leaders, and Executives at companies across the U.S. Learn more about the history of Creativity in Business.
Old rules and familiar tools don’t produce sustainable advantage.
The success of your enterprise depends on people at all levels exercising their Creative License to meet opportunities with innovative solutions. This interactive keynote inspires all employees to claim their inherent creative potential, understand the strengths and challenges associated with their creative style, and activate their Super Powers to improvise, ask powerful questions, see beyond the apparent, and learn.
Help everyone on your team, in your department, or at your company get into the mindset of an innovator, re-ignite discovery and curiosity, re-imagine purpose and destiny, and reinvigorate faith in creativity as one of our most trusted, inexhaustible resources in this changing, complex world.
Great ideas to complex problems are more often the products of a community than an individual.
This keynote highlights key factors impacting the future of creative collaboration, including: understanding your Creative Style, working across multiple communities to create new value, knowledge sharing and inclusive input-gathering, new tools for getting work done in a virtual, distributed, global environment, building shared ownership and accountability, creative workplace designs, and a manifesto for working at a sustainable pace.
Inspire your teams, departments, and cross-functional groups to bring out each others’ best, balance rights and duties within a team, de-regulate control, turn conflict into advantage, and honor each collaborator’s contribution to success.
For over 25 years, Michael Ray, the originator of Creativity in Business taught the celebrated Personal Creativity in Business course. The course was offered primarily at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business – occasionally with colleagues including Rochelle Meyers and Jim Collins – but also in additional non-academic settings.
Over the years, it became clear that the program was having a profound impact on graduates. People who’ participated in the course seemed to have access to a deep source of energy and inspiration. They found new ways to collaborate and contribute to their organizations. They thrived on diversity, and treated others with compassion, acceptance, appreciation, and respect. As one graduate put it, “This is transformation that works and lasts.”
Michael and his colleagues generated and collaborated on a number of related books and a PBS mini-series. Creativity in Business – named as one of the nine “Greatest Business Books Ever Written,” by Inc. Magazine provides excellent background into the foundations of the course.
In 1996, Michael Ray, Jackie McGrath, and colleagues adapted the content of the normally 10-week academic program for corporate use. The program was delivered within Clorox R&D, Abbott Labs, Charles Schwab, Hewlett Packard, and The Men’s Warehouse with dramatic return on investment reported.
Since 1996, two cohort groups of professional educators, coaches, facilitators, and consultants have been certified to deliver the CIB program. Many use the concepts and materials in their personal and executive coaching, or facilitate the program with companies, teachers and non-profit organizations dedicated to social change.
In 2008, during the last of these certification courses, a small team of individuals formed a new partnership, dedicated to bring CIB to corporate audiences. A number of engagements with biotech giant Genentech have helped to shape and hone the approach, tools, and their application for the business realities of the 21st century.
Since then, the program has been delivered in multiple formats to scientists, engineers, project managers, high-tech software engineers and production services staff, as well as sales and marketing groups, IT groups, and business portfolio strategists.