The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement. On this site you will find various menus to put you on the path to continuous improvement in your personal and professional life.

• Home is where you will find videos and lessons learned from world class speakers and wealth masters.

• World Class Speaking will increase your ability to educate, entertain, persuade, and inspire other people. ☗ 日本語/Japanese
  
  
• Wealth Dynamics is about your path of least resistance to success in your business or career. ☗ 日本語/Japanese
  
  
• Guerrilla Marketing will empower you to achieve great results with innovative and affordable marketing that you can do yourself. ☗ 日本語/Japanese

• Coaching is about exactly how you can learn and apply these skills to your business, or help your team implement the ideas.

• William Reed is where you find out what others have to say, and how this could be relevant to you. ☗ 日本語/Japanese
  
  
• Manga Story displays ten scenes of critical moments on the path to becoming a Renaissance Samurai. ☗ 日本語/Japanese

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• Contact is how you get in touch, and where to find out more. ☗ 日本語/Japanese
  

Scroll down and share in the sense of excitement as you discover what makes for World Class communication.

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I didn’t think I’d be having these kinds of emotional issues riding on the back of a garbage truck. I had no idea.~Larry O’Donnell, COO of Waste Management, Undercover Boss

• What would happen if the CEO of your company went undercover under an assumed name, and took a job in the company on the shop floor, in the kitchen, or out in the field? How would it feel to work with their hands, instead of their head? What would it be like to be on the receiving end? Might it not completely change the way they looked at people and ran the company?
• This is exactly what is happening in large corporations, and it is being documented in primetime on a new television series called Undercover Boss, on CBS television, one of the primary networks in the United States. A preview episode of the program debuted in the golden time slot right after the Superbowl on February 7, 2010, attracting 38.6 million viewers, the largest audience to date for a post-Superbowl preview. The new program continues to draw massive audiences, rating second only to the Olympics in its time slot.
  It holds the banner spot on the www.cbs.com website, and less than 3 weeks since the debut of the preview, Undercover Boss already has a Facebook Fan Page approaching 15,000 fans, and a Twitter following that promises geometric growth. Not to mention the attention that this program has been given by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Oprah Show, which has given these executives national celebrity status.
• The pilot episode featured Larry O’Donnell, the president and COO of Waste Management, who worked alongside employees cleaning portable toilets, picking up and sorting trash in one of the world’s most thankless jobs. Although he manages the company, in his incognito role he actually managed to get fired by his supervisor. He was followed by camera crews, but the employees were told that it was for a documentary about what it was like to work at their jobs. For that week, Larry was just a new hire.
  
• The drama of this is palpable, as you watch the top executive facing a new reality he thought he knew everything about, and employees doing grunt work with an amazing spirit of humor and a get-it-done attitude. It is all about leadership that listens, and unsung superstars. Posing as Randy Lawrence, a construction worker, the COO learns what it’s like to work for his own company.
  
• As young as the program is, it has already started to spawn significant lessons for management that are not being lost on the attentive public. A subsequent episode featured  Joe DePinto, the chief executive of 7-Eleven, the largest convenience store chain in the world, who went undercover as a guy named Danny, and emerged with insights and appreciation it would have been impossible to gain any other way. The bNet blog has captured 10 of these insights from DePinto’s experience, which take on the big questions that concern the C-level office. These are lessons we have heard before: synergy, kaizen, fresh eyes, learning from employees, best practices, but this time it comes from the executive’s experience on the shop floor. This wisdom is earned, not borrowed. Read the blog and see: http://budurl.com/lstu
• It is exciting to see the transformation that Undercover Boss unveils in both the boss and the employees once the cover is exposed, and the boss reveals to his work mates who he actually is, and what they did for him. The story doesn’t end with the TV episode, as these companies are making changes that significantly improve the working conditions of their employees. To show how serious management is about listening, the supervisor at Waste Management who fired Larry O’Donnell, has been asked to give a speech to the companies top executives.
  Not every executive can or would want to go undercover or be featured on national television. And how many would be capable of learning and applying the lessons at that level? Yet there are lessons that we can all learn from Undercover Boss, which reminds us that regardless of our role at work, most of us are trying to do our best, sometimes under very difficult conditions, and that we all gain when we are open to learn and eager to do a better job.

NOTE: This article will also be featured on my online column, Creative Career Path.

I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.~Jamie Oliver

• Congratulations to Jamie Oliver, as the winner of the 2010 TED Prize. It is easy to see why in this video, in which passion, talent, and mission come together in a profoundly moving message.
• He puts plain facts in sharp focus, showing with a simple graph how obesity and food related deaths far surpass deaths by homicide, making you wonder who the real criminals are. He educates with theatrical passion, dumping a wheelbarrow of sugar cubes to show the actual amount of sugar ingested by elementary school children in school meals over 5 years just in the flavored milk they drink alone. He shows in a video how elementary school children in America could not even identify by name such common vegetables as tomatoes, lettuce, or celery. If they don’t even know what it is, how can they be expected to eat it?
• He shows how much he cares about people by reaching out to the many through the few who represent them, the families and individuals who are literally dying of obesity-related illnesses. How could it be that no one ever told them?
• Although he doesn’t hesitate to cry shame on the industries and policies that have created the problem of obesity, he recognizes that for this food revolution to succeed, everyone needs to be educated and brought in as participants to solve our common problem.
• Jamie Oliver has kick-started a food revolution in America going right to the heart of the problem in homes, school meals, and fast food. He doesn’t just advocate radical change, he makes it easy and fun, educational and entertaining.
• In this presentation his passion is more political than his usual videos about food, which are well worth watching if you want to catch his contagious love for food culture. Plenty of education and entertainment at http://www.jamieoliver.com/
• He is also a social media genius, and you are welcomed right away to join Jamie on the many channels where he shares his passion online and in print, through Jamie’s diary, online videos, TV shows, books, dvds, blog, magazine, social networks, and communities.
  
• He has even got an iPhone App, Jamie Oliver 20 Minute Meals, which is a fabulous way to get started, and get engaged. His energy is contagious, his message is meaningful, and his heart is in the right place.
• Jamie Oliver has much to teach us about food, love, and life itself. Tune in, and get some of the good stuff!

Gary Vaynerchuk was born in Belarus (USSR) in 1975, emigrated to the United States in 1978, rebranded his family business after graduating from college as Wine Library, growing it from a $4 million to $45 million business, and building on his passion as an unconventional sommelier devoted to educating consumers, is now a leading social media superstar, a bestselling author and consultant to Fortune 500 companies. Gary Vaynerchuk is a phenomenon!

• The video here is from a CNN Interview with Gary Vaynerchuk on May 16, 2009, before his book Crush It! was released. In the interview he says he has 350,000 followers on Twitter. Now just 8 months and a bestselling book later, he has 847,199 followers on Twitter (Oh! did I forget to add you?). Check his current number of follows on Twitter @garyvee.
• He is a great example of how passion goes farther than polish, and a huge inspiration to entrepreneurs and leagues of people who are trying find a better way to work for a living in a down economy.
  
• His achievements are remarkable. He signed a 10-book deal with HarperStudio for over $1,000,000. And his first book in the series Crush It!, became an Amazon and a New York Times bestseller. His Wine Library TV Show airs as a daily Internet video podcast, and attracts up to 90,000 viewers. He has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, GQ, and Time Magazine, and you can read even more about him on Wikipedia, as well as his bio and media credits on his Wine Library TV website.
  
• In this interview he makes some very interesting points for entrepreneurs and for businesses challenged by the changing economy. He says that everybody needs a platform, whether it be Internet, TV, or print media. And yet the secret to the platform is not about broadcasting but about engaging people of like interest in conversation. Traditional businesses are lost in this world, because they are still stuck in the paradigm that they control the message, rather than the audience of their potential customers. He says that Twitter and Facebook should be thought of as a cocktail party, rather than a networking event, and that if you come from the heart with quality and passion and work hard to participate, only then can you find ways to make a living from your passion.
• He says that his passion has attracted eyeballs, and whenever that many people start paying attention to something, it automatically attracts people who want to participate and are even happy to pay for the privilege. Already Gary consults for Fortune 500 companies who want what he’s got, the ability to attract and engage with their customers. And he has a steady stream of people who have direct or peripheral connections to the wine industry, from wine glass makers to mineral water producers, who want to pay him thousands of dollars to be part of his show.
• While Gary’s style may not be your style, and you may not be willing or able to devote almost full time to maintaining such a presence on line and in the media, one thing is for certain. As he points out, the Internet is still a teenager, and we have only begun to comprehend its potential. He compares Twitter and Facebook to tools like crayons, markers, or fax machines, and says that once people get how to use these tools to really reach out with what they care about, the potential to survive and thrive in the new economy is like a dream come true.
• Meanwhile, why not join Gary for a glass of wine on his Internet program, Wine Library TV, and think about how this might apply to your business.

Will Smith says being realistic is the most common road to mediocrity. You have to know, this is what I believe, and I’m willing to die for it.

Will Smith is one of my favorite actors, and in this compilation of interview excerpts he shows wisdom from his experience Big Willie Style. Will Smith’s bio is amazing, ranging from rap star artist to film superstar. He makes it look easy, but we see in these interviews that he works incredibly hard at perfecting his craft.

• I love the way it starts, “I have a great time with my life, and I want to share it.”
• He says it doesn’t matter where you are, because you are in the process of becoming something better.
• “Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft.” Will says that talent alone is not enough. You need to develop the skill to show it to others.
• His humor is classical Will Smith. “If we get on a treadmill, only two things certain. You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die on that treadmill.” Many people assume that others get ahead because of special gifts or breaks, and totally forget about the power of belief and perseverance. No wonder he played the lead in the move ALI.
• He talks about how you build a wall, not all at once, but by laying each brick in the most perfect way a brick can be laid, day after day.
• His inspiring message about making the world better for someone else because you were here, wins applause. As they say, it’s not about you.
• He says there is no reason to have a plan B, because it distracts from plan A. Will Smith has no use for being realistic, calling it the most common road to mediocrity.
• He is calm, wise, and funny, and ends with a message that if you just decide and commit to what it’s going to be, then the universe will get out of your way.
  

Steve Jobs is one of most remarkable entrepreneurs of our generation, not only for his successes, but because he is so easy to relate to as a human being. He has weathered the storms, stayed honest with himself, and come out of it generously with wisdom for the rest of us.

Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford is more than a speech, it is a riveting story! And with skilled camera work occasionally capturing the faces of the students in the audience, you feel as if you are there witnessing it yourself in real time.

• Steve Jobs needs no introduction, but you might want to revisit and find out why you should listen to him. His achievements over the last 3 decades have changed the world.
• He relates extremely well to the students, joking about he himself had never graduated from college, and yet what he gained both as a drop out and a drop in, taking classes in calligraphy that had an impact on his design sense at Apple.
• He tells three stories, and anchors each with wonderful foundational phrases. The rule of three is a wonderful way to deliver a memorable message.
  
• The first story is about connecting the dots. Believing that following your curiosity and intuition will lead to connecting the dots down the road, and that will make all the difference.
  
• In his second story he spoke about love and loss, and the lessons he learned from getting fired from Apple, the company he had started, only to eventually come back in style. Love what you do, keep looking, and don’t settle.
  
• His second story was about his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer, and how his doctors told him to get his affairs in order and prepare to die. He lived with that diagnosis, and through a miracle of diagnosis and surgery, enabled him to recover. His message is plain. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
  
• Finally, he ends with a wonderful story about the Whole Earth Catalog, and its farewell message in the final publication, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
• Humility, honesty, courage. Jobs has them all.
  

What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus. ~From Hans Rosling Bio on TED.com

Hans Rosling is a professor of Global Health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. He is also the professor you wish you had had, particularly in the hard subjects like economics, science, and statistics. His talks are captivating, but also offer many lessons in style for speakers.

• Hans Rosling’s enthusiasm for his subject is immediate and contagious. At times it reaches the high pitch of a sportscaster, which is remarkable when you realize that he is bringing to life not just statistics, but the world we live in.
• Hans Rosling is one of the world’s “100 most important global thinkers” of 2009, according to Foreign Policy Magazine.
• He founded a non-profit organization called Gapminder which not only “unveils the beauty of statistics for a fact-based world view,” but also closes the gaps in our perception based on the stereotypes we have accepted, and the inertia of lazy thinking.
• The world is a fascinating place, a living organism with dimensions that far exceed our five senses, and also the extension of those senses with technology such as satellites, the Internet, and the global telecommunications system. However, our mind is less limited than our senses, and Hans Rosling has a gift of being able not only to talk about vast trends shaping our lives, but also to show it to you in a way that is instantly understandable.
• He intermingles humor and rhythm in his presentation in a way that is captivating to the end, and deserves the great applause he gets from one of the world’s most demanding audiences at TED.
• He has a mission to give the world access to the vast quantities of data that sleep in our databases, to make it visible through his software, and searchable through the Internet.
• As you watch trends unfold like a global climate tracker on the big screen, you feel a sense of awe and optimism, in spite of all of the problems we have.
• Most of all, Hans Rosling has a gift for tapping into our world, and transporting us into the World.
  

Scientists need to work outside their own areas of expertise to make new technologies that are pertinent to the 21st century and to collaborate, both with other scientific disciplines and the arts and humanities. ~Rachel Armstrong

Rachel Armstrong’s presentation is interesting because it suggests a creative solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem, how to repair architecture that is literally losing its ground. More science than fiction, it also contains the romance of a smart solution.

• Rachel Armstrong begins her presentation at TED on a strong note, by saying that “All buildings today have something in common. They are made using Victorian technologies.” She immediately sets the stage by saying how the one way transfer of energy from our environment into inert structures is not sustainable, and then proceeds to outline a cutting edge solution in progress.
• She speaks with assurance, stays focused on the process, and uses slides just enough to illustrate her ideas and engage our emotions through the problem.
• Although she doesn’t particularly interact with the audience using pauses or humor, her style works because she keeps up the pace, and demonstrates passion for her subject.
• She explains what must be a highly technical subject using captivating metaphors. Protocells contain no DNA, but behave like living matter. Metabolic materials don’t exist, so we we had to create them, and they are vigorously architectural. Terrestrial chemistry works everywhere.
• Her theme of architecture that repairs itself is made immediately relevant through her work in progress, experimenting to create a crystal limestone reef to shore up and reclaim the sagging city of Venice. She engages our imagination by saying that, although it might take time,  eventually the result may be indistinguishable from the work of nature itself.
• She engages the audience locally by referring to the lovely fossilized shells in the limestone brickwork in Oxford, where the TED conference is being held. She engages the audience globally by suggesting that the use of ubiquitous metabolic materials can work in countries anywhere in the world.
• Her message connects architecture metaphorically to the structure of our societies, comparing the top down insulated industrial Victorian approach to the more organic type of architecture of the future, in which buildings could be in constant communication with their environment.
• She doesn’t just talk about technology. She talks about how technology affects people.
• Impressive enough as a TED speaker, Rachel Armstrong has a fascinating bio, as a medical doctor, multi-media producer, science fiction author, and arts collaborator.
  

This is a remarkable presentation by Bill Gates, for three reasons.

1. It reveals some of the massive impact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation backed by Warren Buffet is having on making our world a better place for coming generations.
2. It shows how much better a presenter can become when he or she is in their Flow and living their legacy.
3. In the Wealth Dynamics Profile, Bill Gates is a CREATOR near the top of the Wealth Spectrum.

Here are some of the amazing things you can learn.

• Bill Gates points out that the market does not drive people to do the right thing. As one of the richest and most successful entrepreneurs in the world, he certainly speaks with authority on that.
• It reveals some of the massive impact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation backed by Warren Buffet is having on making our world a better place for coming generations.
• It shows how much better a presenter can become when he or she is in their Flow and living their legacy.
• He admits that he is an optimist saying that, “Any tough problem can be solved.” Talk about tough problems, his foundation is tackling malaria, early childhood deaths in poor countries, providing great teachers to people of low income, and by any measure his foundation is making profound and remarkable progress.
• He speaks with passion and dedication about how previous efforts to eradicate malaria have been effective in developed countries, but how much remains to be done in developing countries.
• He uses plain speech, anchors it with numbers and graphical malaria maps we can understand, and then reinforces his point by releasing some (uninfected) mosquitoes into the auditorium, saying that “there is no reason that only poor people should have this problem.”
• He uses a small number of uncluttered slides, in great contrast to his speeches at Microsoft, and resulting in a far superior presentation!
• He uses metaphors to masterfully illustrate the problem so that people get it without any need for explanation. Listen to how he states that there is more money spent on baldness drugs than on malaria, suggesting that baldness is more likely to be an affliction of rich men.
• After explaining the dimensions and solutions to the problem of how to fight malaria and reduce childhood deaths in poor countries, he shifts the focus to how to increase the quality of education for low income people in rich countries.
• He connects the quality of good teachers with the level of innovation that keeps an economy strong, and points out that while less than 20% of people have access to good teachers, while the chances of a lower income child going to jail are much greater than that of being able to attend a 4-year college.
• He tells how his foundation is focusing on the issue of how to reward, retain, model, and widely share the benefits of learning from top teachers, realizing from their research that this is what makes all of the difference.
• His foundation supports KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) , an organization which helps kids from lower income climb the mountain to college, and how in fact 96% of their high school graduates do end up going to a 4-year college.
• He gives us a glimpse of how the teachers in this program are fully engaged themselves, and work hard in team teaching to keep all of the kids involved, particularly those in the critical time of Middle School, grades 5~8.
• He returns to his optimistic note, that now with technology many of the benefits of learning from top teachers can be widely shared, through digital video in the classrooms, team teaching, and making the classes of master teachers available on the Internet and on DVDs.
• He ends with a strong You-Focus, saying that Education is the most important thing to get right, and that the people in the TED audience are not only engaged in a similar mission, but are also in a perfect position to help.
• He ends by presenting all of the people present with a free copy of the book by Jay Matthews, the Newsweek journalist who wrote, Work Hard, Be Nice: How Tow Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America.
• No wonder Bill Gates got a standing ovation at TED. And that is competing against some of the top speakers of our time.

Evan Williams is the Co-Founder of Twitter, the revolutionary 140-character microblog platform that is revolutionizing the way we communicate and do business. BusinessWeek said “Williams has a knack for figuring out how people want to keep in touch, even before they seem to know it themselves.”

While Williams is not a dynamic speaker, in terms of what he has actually done, he makes many platform performers seem like sideshows. In this video at TED, which comes with a translation in Japanese subtitles, he shares some intriguing glimpses behind the scenes of a quiet revolution in communication.

• Note that Evan Williams formerly worked at Google, where he invented eBlogger, one of the major free blogging platforms available.
• He helped launch Twitter as a side project in 2006 while working at Odeo, simply following a hunch.
  
• Twitter is based on what he describes as simple trivial concept, is that people enjoy being connected in real time despite distance.
• Indeed, a Twitter message which he sends out from the TED conference goes out to his 60,000 plus subscribers in an instant.
• Although it was conceived as a broadcast medium, he says that many of its uses were not anticipated, and a number were invented by users of the platform.
• For example, Twitter has been used in emergencies, elections, and events, and has generated over 2000 Twitter applications thanks to API software, so that users help invent, evolve, and shape the system.
• It has been used in a wide range of applications from helping people track good prices at gas stations, communicating with customers, and raising funds online.
• Many speakers now set up Twitter events to match their real events, so that people involved can all participate, wherever they are in the world.
• Some speakers, such as Guy Kawasaki, actually have started speaking in sound bytes as a courtesy to the many people in their audience who are Twittering during his talk, and spreading his message to tens of thousands of people in real time.
• He ends his talk by saying that he has “learned to follow a hunch, but never assume where it will go.” Modest words masking a powerful and practical intuition.
• Here you can read a TED bio of Evan Williams.