Keith is on tour right now sponsored by the University of Pheonix, and you can register to see his keynote speech free of charge by registering here to find an event in your local city. Hope you can make it!

1. Michael Durant – If you like movies, you have heard his story.  Michael was the pilot in the Black Hawk Helicopter that went down in 1993 in Somalia.  The story of which “Black Hawk Down”was made after.   He was the ONLY survivor of the crash, and had broken both his legs when they went down.  Remarkably, he befriended his torturers, (which is captured well in the movie btw).  This story is incredible, he wrote a book called “In The Company of Heroes”, and was on the cover of TIME magazine.  His keynote is great, and talks about leadership, operating in a changing and dynamic environment, and the importance of training.   He is a name draw, his speech includes clips from the movie and is powerful and interactive, he receives huge reviews every time he speaks.
2. Jim Donald – Former CEO of Starbucks, you may remember the tremendous growth Starbucks went through?  When they suddenly began sprouting on every suburban corner?  Well this is the man responsible for such remarkable growth.  He started as a trainer at Publix Super Markets, and moved on to become the head of operation at Albertsons (which Publix now owns).  He was then called upon by Sam Walton to develop the Super Wal-Mart and afterwards became President of Safeway and Pathmark stores prior to contributing to Starbuck’s explosive growth.  He grew 15,000 stores while at Starbucks and was also responsible for changing 3 key things: 1) He created an ethical distribution process for coffee and cocoa, 2) Funded numerous water programs and 3) Reduced the overall environmental footprint of Starbucks.  When I met Jim, I was blown away with how cool he was – very down to earth.  The type of guy I’d enjoy a round of golf and beers with.  He speaks on Leadership, Sustainability – speech topic:  “Act Like You Own It”
3. Greg Gadson - you can find and excellent article on him in the NY Daily News here.  You don’t have to be a football fan to love Lt. Colonel Greg Gadson.  He is a highly decorated and respected war veteran, started his career as Defensive End at West Point.  He became very close with his coach at West Point and internalized his leadership lessons.  In Iraq, he was in a hum-vee returning from his friends funeral when he was hit with an IED… He was blessed to have survived, lost both his legs and nearly his life.  While in recovery at Walter Reed Hospital, his old coach from West Point, (now the asst. coach to the NY Giants) came to visit him and asked him to come meet the team.  In the locker room, Lt. Colonel Gadson had the team huddle around him and launched his speaking career.  He told them how important it was what they were doing out there on the field;  How much it meant to the troops in Iraq who tuned in for every game, who listed on radios to every play and helped lead them through their tour of duty.  The Giants won not only that game, they continued to win – with Lt. Col. Gadson as their Inspirational Co-Captain they won the super bowl that year.
   He doesn’t talk about Iraq, his topics include his recovery process, team work, overcoming adversity, perseverance, trusting your team and leadership.  This is a guy who gets a standing ovation before he speaks.

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I have never personally met her before, and was taken by her enormous amount of energy and wit. All in all, I have to admit I was expecting to hear more doom and gloom economic predictions, and was pleasantly surprised to walk away holding my head high with a belief that everything will be OK. Without giving too much away, I’d like to share a bit of what we discussed.

Before she began, she wanted to make clear that first and foremost she is a Diehard freemarket economist. Any recession goes through at least two phases: Containment and Resolution.

We are currently in the resolution phase.

She says she expects the economy could stabilize this year and one of the major signs pointing towards this has to do with housing prices. The median house is now valued at approximately 180,000 and the median income is 50,000. With my lending background, here’s a quick rule of thumb: for every 200,000 borrowed … the payment (principal and interest) will be about 1,200 dollars. (200,000 @ 6% over 30 years = payment of 1,199). If you take 50,000 divided by 12 months, this gives this median income earner a monthly gross income of 4166, which would bring their housing debt ratio below 30%.

Simply stated, the median earner can afford the median house. This will contribute to stabilization.

She also said that we’re not going to see high home values across the board for a really long time. Historically it takes about 10 years for houses to regain their previous peak. Which means those of who bought in 2006 shouldn’t count on their houses returning to that value for another 7 years.

Marci explained that economies have the ability to heal themselves, and one of the ways they do that is through prices falling. It doesn’t always feel good to cut prices – “I don’t want to cut my speaking fee” she says with a smile, “but I know when I do I am contributing to the recovery.” Keep an eye on falling prices and the speed at which they fall, as this is the key for economic recovery, and here’s why.

Individual spending, does not really fluctuate. As individuals we have the same basic expenses month in and month out – housing, utilities, transportation, insurance, food etc. Whereas business, well business spending is what swings. Those of us in the meetings industry, think about our budgets! Meeting budgets alone were cut tremendously! Some even down to zero. Same goes for advertising budgets, payroll expenses… you get the ideas. Businesses are what spend the largest chunks of money, and also take the biggest swings. To use intro to econ language, lets say we have 100 dollars and 70 dollars is typically spent on food. If prices drop at the grocery store, and we now only need to spend 45 dollars for the same food, we have just freed up 25 dollars that we can now spend elsewhere. Our spending amount did not fluctuate, but we have now just spread our monies to more places. This is was restores profitability.

We can’t expect to see this reflected in the media yet, as the reporting of numbers lag at least three months. So don’t be surprised that the numbers will LOOK BAD moving forward for at least the next few months, but understand what is going on underneath…. We are healing.

On 401ks…

The inclination is to do EXACTLY THE WRONG THING. You don’t go to the store and say “hmmmm, this dress is 50% off, I think I’ll wait until it gets back to normal before I buy.” That is exactly “bass ackwards”, Marci says. Marci’s recommendation is to throw your statements away for the next 20 years! You can’t touch the money anyway, so why look at it – just stay steady, NOW is the time to double up on your 401k contributions if you can. If we’ve learned one thing its that when we’re ready to retire we can’t be fully invested in stocks anyway, we need annuities an other retirement tools. Marci had many terrific one-liners, my favorite of which I’ll share with you in a moment. With retirements though, her gem continued as “and if you’re planning to live until your 105, you can really stick it to the annuity guys, because they’re planning to see you kick off at seventy.”

Stop Drop and Roll…. remember this? If you’re clothes catch on fire, we need to stop, drop, and roll – but what is our instinct? Our instinct is to RUN. Same goes for the 401ks. Don’t run, double down if you can.

On the stimulus package and recessions…

“Is like giving a blood transfusion to yourself.” Marci says. If you’re dieing of blood loss in your right arm, and you plug your left arm in to your right in order to transfer blood….. This is not going to work.

Things look better in the fall, although she says unemployment may pass 10% during the summer. Can the economy move itself forward with 90% employment? We like to think so.

Marci was entertaining, intelligent, and had a positive message – which I think we all need to hear right now.

As usual, the group started out very skeptical voicing such opinions and questions as:

“Why do WE need to know this? We don’t even HELP WITH the theme. We’re just told what to do and we do it!”

By the end of the workshop this exact person was thrilled with the excercises, what she had learned and the tools she now has moving forward. We are working on finding a date to have her and her executive team over for a design session in our EVENT LAB for their next event.