Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

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Creative Foodies… in the USA

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The 10 Most Creative People in Food

The Magazine FastCompnay has launched a series on the 100 most creative business profiles. Here is their take on who are the top 10 creative Foodies.

1. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Jean-Georges Management
The Alsace-born celebrity chef has built a multimillion-dollar, multi-Michelin-starred empire without slapping his face on a frying pan or frozen pizza. Vongerichten’s unprecedented partnership with Starwood Hotels has given him license to unleash his creativity — and his take on Asian flavors — in 50 new restaurants over the next five years. “If I could have my dream,” he has said, “I would open a new restaurant every month.”

2. Dan Barber, Blue Hill restaurants
Barber is foodies’ latest locavore darling, the driving spirit behind the two acclaimed Blue Hill restaurants, and a passionate advocate for regional farm networks. The winner of the 2009 Outstanding Chef award from the James Beard Foundation, he practices what he preaches at his family’s farm and at the nonprofit Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture.

3. Will Allen, Growing Power
Since he used his life savings to buy the last working farm in Milwaukee, Allen has been dedicated to creating a more just food system. Growing Power’s network of urban teaching farms raises vegetables, fish, livestock, and honeybees; supplies local restaurants; creates sustainable cafeteria programs for corporations; and distributes food to more than 100,000 families. “We’re not just growing food, we’re growing people too,” he says.

4. Dan Cutforth and Jane Lispitz, Magical Elves Productions
Top Chef creators and executive producers Cutforth and Lispitz –”the elves,” as they’re known – have used reality television, of all things, to lift up serious cooking rather than reduce it to farce (we’re looking at you, Gordon Ramsey). In the process, Top Chef has become a pillar of the Bravo network’s urban-sophisticate strategy, spawning a popular Web site, cookbooks, and merchandise — making it an example of the 21st century integrated media brand.

5. Floyd Zaiger, Zaiger Genetics
The father of the pluot, 83-year-old Zaiger, has developed — by hand pollination, not genetic manipulation — some 200 new and improved fruits, from low-acid peaches to cherries that grow in warm climates to the golden red apricot-plum cross known as an aprium. “Developing a new cross takes 12 to 15 years,” says Zaiger’s daughter, Leith Gardner. “You need a little patience.” Coming next: a blue-skinned aprium.

6. Ed Kaczmarek, Kraft
Pay for an ad? Only if it’s extra cheesy. Director of innovation Kaczmarek’s Kraft iFood Assistant, which offers Kraft devotees with iPhones, thousands of recipes and more, proves not only that brands can create meaningful mobile experiences but also that customers will pay for them. Kraft’s cooking app ($0.99) cracked the iPhone’s top 100 apps list, rising at one point to the No. 2 slot in the lifestyle section, and helped the $42 billion company better understand its customers and what they’re shopping for.

7. Temple Grandin, Associate professor, Colorado State University
“There are similarities between my autistic mind and animal thinking,” Grandin says. The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow, the title of her video bio on YouTube, has relied on that understanding to develop more humane ways of treating cattle destined for slaughter. She has no fans in the animal-rights blogosphere, but the walled, curved chutes she has designed and the handling standards she has set up for companies like Swift and McDonald’s — no flapping objects, no shadows, no spraying in the face — reduce stress in the animals and improve the efficiency of the operation as well as the quality of the meat.

8. Becky Frankiewicz, VP of portfolio marketing for Frito-Lay North America
Who says good for you has to mean “tastes like cardboard”? Frankiewicz is leading the shift for Frito-Lay’s Smartfood and Baked Lays brands to appeal to women, using design and taste to communicate that healthy snacking isn’t an oxymoron. New packaging is more elegant, appealing, and signals health benefits, and new technology lets flavor be baked into each crisp.

9. Jeff Jordan, CEO of OpenTable
Jordan, an eBay vet, has helped make restaurant reservations fun, adding features such as detailed users reviews and clever lists to help restaurant fans make better decisions in the same place they make their reservations. Perhaps his neatest trick has been to take OpenTable public in the current market climate — and get a 1999-style response. OpenTable stock hit a high of $35.50 on its opening day in late May, a nice bump from its initial price of $20 a share.

10. David Chang, Momofuku
The intense, award-winning chef launched his quirky downtown Manhattan mini-kingdom with inventive takes on Asian noodles and pork buns. Besides producing great food, Chang hits all the stylish notes — local produce, cool staff, lots and lots of pork. Plus, his latest (and priciest) venture, Ko, is the only restaurant we know that takes reservations only online.

Read more about the 100 Most Creative People in Business

The IACC Global Meeting Aug 2009

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Navigating the Perfect Storm

We are co-hosting this event together with Toke Paludan Moeller, Interchange

There will be no transfer of ‘wisdom’ from experts to you the participants. Instead we will explore the unknown together – in a structure guided by experienced facilitators – at the end of the three-day session you will have a much better idea what you as a leader need to go home and do to manage the changes that are taking place. Changes that are going to challenge your current way of doing business.

If you have not signed up already now is the time – more information here

Speed of change

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I often refer to the speed of change as the main reason for us to speed up our learning.
Changes requires adaptation.
Adaptation for humans means learning new stuff.

On of my main inspirations in understanding how fast change is happening in our society is Ray Kurzweil whom I often refer to in my presentations. Here is a taste of what Kurzweil means when he speaks of change…

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You’ve said that the year 2045 is the year of the singularity. Can you explain what that is?

RAY KURZWEIL: By 2029, we’ll have finished the reverse engineering of the human brain. There’s already 20 regions of the brain we’ve modeled and simulated and tested. We’ll have very powerful and very small computers by that time. Most of the computers in the world are not yet in our bodies and brains, but some of them are in our brains. If you’re a Parkinson’s patient you can put a computer in your brain. It’s not blood cell-sized today, it’s pea-sized.

And if you take what we can do today and realize these technologies will be a billion times more powerful per dollar in 25 years, a hundred thousand times smaller, you get some idea of what we’ll be able to do.

And one thing we’ll be able to do is send millions of nanobots, blood cell-sized devices, inside our bloodstream. They’ll keep us healthy from inside. They’ll go inside our brains and interact with our biological neurons, just the way neural implants do today, and put our brains on the Internet, make us smarter, provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system. And so, we will become a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence.

So over time, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will predominate, and that’s basically what we mean by the singularity. When you get out to 2045, we’ll have multiplied the overall intelligence of the human/machine civilization a billionfold, and that’s such a profound transformation that we call it a singularity.

Read the full interview here

Also look out for the film about to be released Transendent Man

Bowler I med et gardin på tværs af banen?

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[lang_da]Politikken. dk har den 9 maj en rigtig god artikel med et velkendt budskab:

“Professor på Copenhagen Business School Henrik Holt Larsen mener, at manglende anerkendelse på jobbet giver mere sygefravær: »Det, der virkelig betyder noget i dagligdagen, er en god leder. Det kan afgøre, om man har lyst til at blive i jobbet. Manglende feedback giver tvivl, og det kan være en kilde til stress, som giver højt sygefravær hos mange virksomheder«, siger han.

Det svarer lidt til at bowle med et gardin midt på banen, forklarer han. Man kan anstrenge sig nok så meget for at kaste godt, men hvis bowlingkuglen triller ind under et sort gardin, kan man ikke se, om den rammer. Den tvivl og forvirring, det kan give ikke at ane, om arbejdsindsatsen er i orden, kan i sig selv føre til sygdom hos selv den dygtigste medarbejder.

For det handler ikke kun om, at chefen skal dele sukkermadder ud til de ansatte, men om, at de føler sig set, mener forfatteren til ’Førstehjælp til Feedback’, Anders Stahlschmidt: »Det behøver ikke være ros, men at man ser sine medarbejdere og interesserer sig for, hvad de laver.

Hvert år smider virksomheder millioner af kroner ned i et sort hul, fordi medarbejderne lægger sig syge eller siger deres job op. Det skyldes, at mange chefer enten kritiserer eller helt overser de ansatte, skriver Anders Stahlscmidt i en ny bog med titlen ’Førstehjælp til Feedback’, som udkommer 6. maj.”

Læs hele artiklen i Politikken
[/lang_da]

Top 10 Meeting trends for 2009

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Below is list of top 10 Meeting trends in the US as seen from the point of view of one of the big US operators. I think the overall trends very much reflect what I am hearing from the main European markets as well.

But I would also like to ad on a personal note that never has my in-box received so many offers of virtual seminars or webinars. From Harvard to grassroots organizations they are all jumping in to more and more advanced forms of elearning/brodcasting. At the same time I have been signed up to attend 3 major events/trainings/conferences this spring – they have all been canceled due to lack of attendants.

I am also getting very clear signs that clients are trying to not just reduce travel cost but to eliminate them completely. There is both a cost argument and an environmental consideration here – and i have a distinct feeling that this is not going to swing back to normal once the current financial difficulties are over. Once companies have learnt that no-travel is an option they are going to stick with that, swine flu is not going to help here either.

Trend 1 – The Business of Meetings is Business

This year more than ever before, the business of meetings is straight-up ROI. There’s not a lot of room for leisure and extracurricular play in the current meeting environment where every single dollar is measured for its contribution to the success of the overall conference.

Meetings have never been more serious, focused, or strategic — or more regional, for that matter, as transportation expenses are trimmed. It’s good news for conference centers, which are all about serious meeting environments.

Trend 2 – It’s Not Easy to be Green …

It’s not easy to be green … or at least it’s not easy to be green in a challenged economy! It isn’t that planners no longer care about the green status of a property – it’s just that they are a whole lot more focused at present on securing that property at the best price possible for their next meeting.

In 2009, price trumps green.

Trend 3 – We’ll Get Back to you in Six Months

Across Benchmark Hospitality’s portfolio, the first half of 2009 is proving to be a challenge with a lot of in-the-month-for-the-month meetings booked. Push-back on pricing is universal and meeting lengths are being shaved by a day, on average.

Things are looking up in the 2nd half of 2009 though. Booking pace is in recovery for the second half of the year and 2010 is on target and looking healthy.

Trend 4 – Stuffed, Packed, Studded with Value!

The demise of the complete meeting package is greatly exaggerated! For the most part, demand remains strong and the value of the package – and in Benchmark’s case the company’s branded Benchmark Conference Plan — is recognized. But packages are expected to be loaded with value, add-on benefits, and, get this, there’s a growing demand for double occupancy.

Although packages are negotiated with the usual rates, dates and space considerations, today’s negotiations linger on and on and on with planners watching every penny as meeting budgets are cut from 10 percent to slash & burn proportions. Every meeting dollar must be measurable and welcome receptions, afternoons of leisure, and special dinner events are out. Working lunches and dinners, regional gatherings, doubling up in guestrooms, and value-added options are what’s in this year!

Trend 5 – Believe It or Not, Teambuilding Remains!

Teambuilding is not D.O.A. this year as has been the case in other soft economies and demand is projected to increase in 2010.

Planners are negotiating hard on price, and fewer sessions are being scheduled this year over last, but companies continue to see value in the team-enrichment benefits offered through creative teambuilding programming, such as corporate social responsibility initiatives. In these exercises, groups are creatively brought together to accomplish a task as a team that also benefits a local or national charitable organization. Often the task is outside the norm of the group’s daily activities, and requires them to constructively pull together as a team to accomplish the assignment, frequently with new leadership patterns emerging.

Trend 6 – Tea for Two (make it herbal), Tee Times for Twenty

Maybe not this year. Tight budgets and serious meeting environments are taking their toll on extracurricular activities once so popular.

There’s no problem getting a spa or tee time this year, but it will be on the conferee’s own dime and it better not be scheduled over a conference session. Not that there’s anything wrong with a round of golf, a manicure or an herbal wrap, but in 2009 it’s about perception.

Trend 7 – I Plan, Therefore I Am

Once again the industry is consolidating. Planning is increasingly seen as a part-time function … with planning responsibilities loaded on already overwhelmed administrative personnel and department heads. And third party planners are re-emerging.

Conference Service Managers have never been more important or more welcome by this growing group of planners. Their one-stop planning resources and services, coupled with a purpose-designed learning environment, streamline the conference planning process, helping even the most inexperienced planner deliver a first-rate, productive meeting at a time when this is of maximum importance.

Trend 8 – Three Squares a Day. That’s it!

Gone are the welcome receptions, theme dinners and special luncheons. Planners’ meal requests are pretty much limited to three square meals a day and that’s it.

Companies are even asking that refreshment breaks be scaled back to downplay perceptions of extravagance. Where there are special requests by planners they’re about healthy options and fresh ingredients foraged locally.

Trend 9 – The Silver Lining

That’s right … there’s a silver lining and it’s found within select market segments where meeting demand is growing. These include government, military and defense-related meetings, as well as education, state associations and religious market gatherings. Perhaps this should make sense in these times.

There’s more. The medical, biotech and pharmaceutical segments remain strong too. Serious market segments for serious times, it seems – perfect for serious meeting environments.

Trend 10 – Getting Serious About Learning Environments

Productive meeting environments have never been more put to the test or proven their worth more actively than right now. In a business environment where every dollar – every penny for that matter — is meaningful and expected to yield a measurable ROI, dedicated meeting environments like conference centers deliver and planners are turning to them.

Ok, they may lack the glamour of center city hotels, or the status of landmark properties, or the sex-appeal of exotic resorts, but that’s a unique selling proposition these days.

Conference centers deliver on the promise of a dedicated and focused learning environment, are wired for maximum productivity, provide high quality yet non-extravagant food & beverage, offer pleasant and comfortable guestroom accommodations, and importantly, provide dedicated conference service support. In short, serious meeting environments for serious times.

Bron: Benchmark Hospitality International – 2009-04-25

Source : https://www.eventplanner.be/nieuws-trends/evenementen/3544/top-10-meeting-trends.html

Hornstrup Kursuscenter på YouTube …

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[lang_da]Jeg blev nysgerrig efter hvad Hornstrup Kursus center var for en størrelse – så jeg googlede dem og fandt denne video, som de selv introducere:
“Jørgen Kronborg og Martin Monberg fortæller om Danmarks bedste læringsmiljø, Hornstrup Kursuscenter.
Hør også instruktører og gæster fortælle om deres oplevelser. En film om ånd, tryghed, involvering og viden.”

Jeg ved ikke om de bevist arbejder med The Service Profit Chain – hvis de gør er det i hverfald lige efter bogen – det skal prøves en dag, helt klart [/lang_da]