The following notes were taken at a Keynote Session at Forum 2017, the annual convention of CPBI (Canadian Pension and Benefits Institute) with the theme: “Thriving In a Climate of Change”.

Speaker: Leonard Brody
Mr. Brody is an entrepreneur and business visionary involved with tech start-ups and concert promotion.

Key Points
We are rewriting the planet from the ground up. Every human activity and endeavour is being assessed, evaluated, and transformed. Even the new pope is rewriting a 1,700 year old institution, the Catholic Church.

We live in a time of unprecedented change, as we see institutions, governments, financial systems, and power structures melting down around us. As an example, for the first time in history, a single individual can now reach millions or even billions of people instantly via online technologies, without any form of mediation.

We have gone from being receivers of media to being nodes of media, and in doing so, we have each bifurcated into two separate identities, physical and virtual.

Amazingly, people are 4X more trusting of someone’s virtual identity than their actual physical self. To amplify this, 66 percent of marriages originate online, on a medium that didn’t even exist 25 years ago. And more amazingly, these marriages are 20 percent more successful than marriages that originate the old-fashioned way (eg bar, work, gym, blind date).

In this world of change, it is now possible to finance new ideas from a crowd rather than crossing a moat into the realm of venture capitalists.

There is a rising “entrepreneurial class”. People say they desire control, but in reality many are starting their own business out of necessity rather than accepting low paying jobs.

A suggestion for business people is to engage in “parallelism”, where you build a new business alongside your current business with the goal of destroying your current business and replacing it with the new one. Invest 10-25 percent of your time and resources into the parallel venture with the goal of bringing in at least 10 percent of your revenue from new products every year.

 

Leonard Brody