Value Creators

Sustainability in the food supply chain has become a vital consideration for the resolution of food chain risk. It’s also become a mission for some food producers and distributors and for some food brands, it’s become a marketing mandate.  Maisie Ganzler has been orchestrating the critical alignment required for the pursuit of sustainability in the food supply chain and articulating the crucial al...

David Kong discusses his transition from Finance to Entrepreneurship and the process of building a supply chain for a product with exclusive features, such as thin, and handcrafted glasses. He explains how he searched for manufacturers, tested samples, and addressed production issues. Despite challenges with finding warehouses and improving packaging, Kong emphasizes the importance of creating val...

How do the value creation principles of subjective value, entrepreneurship and creativity apply in a highly technical rules-based environment like SOC Compliance audits. These are objective validations of data security measures based on customer-defined criteria similar to traditional financial audits but more specific and subjective. The answer lies in the understanding of customer needs. Mike De...

Jeff Amerine and Hunter Hastings, discuss the detailed process of building startup ecosystems and fostering entrepreneurship. Jeff Amerine, emphasizes the role of entrepreneurs in spearheading ecosystem development, suggesting that successful ecosystems are entrepreneur-led initiatives.  Leveraging available tools and resources, including AI and cloud computing services, has democratized entrepren...

In this episode of the Value Creators Podcast, dive deep into the classic battle between market-driven innovation and centrally planned industrial policy with our esteemed guest, Christian Sandstrom, a leading voice for individualism and free-market solutions and author and professor at Jönköping International Business School and the Ratio Institute in Sweden. In this conversation, we unpack the g...

Hunter Hastings and Kartik Gada discuss the transformative dynamics of the digital economy and its profound implications for society, economics, and governance. Kartik Gada provides a compelling analysis of how the exponential growth of the high-tech sector is reshaping traditional notions of supply, demand, and pricing, highlighting the unique characteristics of digital goods that defy convention...

Professor Raushan Gross, who teaches Business Management And Leadership at Pfeiffer University, has focused his most recent research on the impact and influence of A.I. on entrepreneurship. He published some of this research in a series of articles at mises.org. One of them links A.I. to The Wealth Of Nations, and, of course, the wealth of nations is driven by entrepreneurship. From this vantage p...

Chet Richards discusses the intersection of military strategy and business leadership, offering valuable insights for navigating complex environments. Emphasizing the importance of agility and adaptability, Chet explores Colonel John Boyd's OODA Loop concept, highlighting the need for continuous observation, orientation, decision-making, and action.  He underscores the role of leadership in s...

Adaptive entrepreneurship refers to a dynamic approach to business leadership and business practice that embraces continuous learning, rapid adaptation, and the creation of novel ideas. Mark McGrath and Hunter Hastings discuss the critical aspects of adaptiveness in dynamic environments. They explore the aftermath of failure to adapt to nonlinear external change. The conversation emphasizes the im...

Mental models are defined as fundamental assumptions that shape the way individuals perceive and interact with the world. When our mental models are wrong, we can’t see the world as it really is. New mental models introduce a new and better understanding. This episode of the Value Creators podcast introduces eleven fundamental mental models, ranging from understanding value as a subjective creatio...

Visual design is an important element in value creation, especially in telling a brand’s or a business’s story in a way that engages with customers and communicates shared values. Visual designers are multi-talented artists and storytellers with an acute understanding of customers and their emotional responses to visual cues. Our guest this week is Jacqueline Porter, an accomplished professional i...

In our ongoing series investigating leadership in business - coming from the skeptical perspective of “Is there such a thing?” - we meet Amanda Goodall, a professor of leadership at Bayes Business School, City University of London, specializing in the influence of leaders and managers on performance, shares insights from her book "Credible: The Power of Expert Leaders."  She has a new pe...

Moshik Temkin is a historian who offers an alternative perspective on leadership. He asks, do leaders make history or does history make leaders? Those two forces can’t be separated. While leaders contribute to shaping history, they are also molded by powerful historical forces. This nuanced perspective is evident in analyses of historical figures like FDR, Margaret Thatcher, Martin Luther King Jr....

We live in a video age, which opens up a vast array of entrepreneurial pathways. Video is a field for open-ended free creative expression, as well as for tightly managed business tools built for ROI. It’s the ideal field for creative entrepreneurial small business innovators. Cynthia Kay of CK and CO is both a business founder and CEO of a video production business and a consultant and advisor to...

LaSean Smith outlines a business investment partnership built on permanent capital , emphasizing long-term commitment and trust-building between an investor/source of capital and a business. The discussion covers disciplined methodologies, leadership transitions, and a unique compensation approach using Phantom Stock Shares. LaSean predicts a rise in smaller, values-based companies, and underscore...

The nature of work has changed, so how we manage it must change, too. As businesses barrel along into the fast-changing digital age, we find that the very nature of work has changed. The new name for the office or the factory is the hybrid workplace. Not only where we do work, but how we do work has changed, and how we synchronize work with each other has changed the most. For the firm, productivi...

Trini Amador is the Value Creators’ go-to guru for all things marketing. He has a long career as CEO of a global branding consultancy, BHC Consulting, and he is also the founder and proprietor of Gracianna , an estate winery that has established a portfolio of greatly acclaimed, gold medal winning prestige wines from its home in the heart of Sonoma County wine country, on the banks of the Russian...

We all suffer from negativity. That’s a business risk for entrepreneurs, since we are in the business of running lots of experiments, some of which will work and some of which won’t. If we process the learning negatively (“I should never have tried that” versus “One more useful piece of knowledge”) we open ourselves up to unproductive disappointment instead of the energizing excitement of discover...

Jeremy Vesta is a Value Creator in a field where value creation is intensely focused on the experiences of individual consumers: health care. He’s CFO of Curally, an innovative services company designed to help individuals in a highly distinctive and intensely focused manner: helping every individual to be healthier today than they were yesterday. Curally is bringing a fresh new kind of innovation...

A breakthrough technique for Small Business: Don’t manage, build systems.  Many small business owners experience frustration in trying to manage their businesses. So many things can get in the way of organized and profitable implementation. Management is hard, especially when it involves managing other people. Beverlee Rasmussen has interviewed and coached thousands of small business owners all ov...

Damon Lembi is the CEO of LearnIt, a service company dedicated to helping all firms become learning organizations. He is the go-to expert on learning, change, and people development. He shared some of his 25+ years of experience with The Value Creators podcast.

In this episode, Josefine Campbell shares how being agile is the most important and impactful management innovation of the 21st century.  How we need to strip away all bureaucratic and processual obstacles to create a fast delivery of superior customer experiences, how its principles can apply at the individual level as well as the organizational level, and how being agile comes down to self-aware...

It is evident that in today's economy, AI & software are extremely powerful tools in business, creative pursuits, and innovation.   In this episode, Ben Johnson, co-founder of Particle41 and other successful software companies, joins to discuss the integration of AI from enhancing customer support to aiding software development, the ethical considerations of AI usage, and its simulation o...

Mark McGrath of AGLX has developed a management approach he calls The Adaptive Entrepreneurial Method. He combines the insights of John Boyd and the entrepreneurial principles of Austrian economics.  Boyd was a prolific writer on strategy, particularly famous for his development of the OODA Loop model of decision-making under uncertainty, feedback, and responsive re-orientation, as well as the aut...

There’s a considerable debate among consultants and academics regarding the definition of management: what is it? Is it a science, is it a process, is it a set of tools that business schools teach us how to use?  In this episode, James Burstall comes on to explain his perspective on management as a mindset (the interacting mindsets of many different people in many different circumstances in fact) ...