“If you take care of your mind, you take care of the world.”
- Arianna Huffington
CXC welcomed Arianna Huffington to Philadelphia in 2014.
Connections to Global Thought Leaders.
CreateXChange has connections to the brightest minds in the Arts + Business communities. Bringing these minds together in Philadelphia for keynote addresses, panel discussions, Q&A sessions, or meet and greets has been a focus of Karin’s during her time at the Arts + Business Council of Greater Philadelphia.
Having the right discussions, with the right people, at the right time, can change any attendee’s perspective and enhance their toolkit. For leaders across the region and country, engaging with these thought leaders can even provide the creative advantage necessary to innovate.
Daymond John
Arianna Huffington
Malcolm Gladwell
Amy Cuddy
Marie Forleo
Simon Sinek
John Maeda
Sheryl Sandberg
Pauline Brown
Bruce Mau
Adam Grant
Beth Comstock
Past Programs.
Sir Ken Robinson - Leading a Cultural of Innovation
Sir Ken Robinson is an English author, speaker, and international advisor on education in the arts to the government, non-profits, education and arts bodies. Also known for his popular TED talks such as “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”.
Robert Redford - Americans for the Arts
Charles Robert Redford Jr., known professionally as Robert Redford, is an American actor, director, producer, businessman, environmentalist, and philanthropist. He is the founder of the Sundance Film Festival
Malcolm Gladwell - The Art of Battling Giants
Malcolm Gladwell, CM is an English-born Canadian journalist, best-selling author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. His popular book The Art of Battling Giants was a bestseller.
Bruce Mau - Massive Change Network
Mau was the creative director of Bruce Mau Design, and the founder of the Institute Without Boundaries. In 2010, Mau went on to establish The Massive Change Network in Chicago.
John Mackey - Conscious Capitalism
In this book, Whole Foods Market cofounder John Mackey and Conscious Capitalism, Inc. cofounder Raj Sisodia argue for the inherent good of both businesses and capitalism.
Sallie Krawcheck – Women in the Workforce
Sallie Krawcheck is the CEO and Co-founder of Ellevest, a digital financial advisor for women launched in 2016. She is focused on elevating women in the work force and ensuring they have equal ability to advance through the ranks.
Eric Ries – The StartUp Way
Eric Ries is an American entrepreneur, blogger, and author of The Lean Startup, a book on the lean startup movement. He is also the author of The Startup Way, a book on modern entrepreneurial management.
Anjali Kumar – Lessons from a Positive Disruptor
Anjali Kumar is author, advisor, attorney, and “idea acupuncturist.” She was the Founding General Council and Head of Social Innovation at Warby Parker. Prior to Warby Parker she was the senior counsel at Google where she was a commercial and product attorney on areas ranging from Google X to YouTube.
Marcus Buckingham - Nine Lies About Work
Marcus is a global researcher and thought leader focused on unlocking people’s strengths, increasing their performance, and pioneering the future of how people work.
Rana El Kaliouby - Girl, Decoded
Rana el Kaliouby is an Egyptian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur in the field of expression recognition research and technology development, which is a subset of facial recognition designed to identify the emotions expressed by the face.
Laura Huang - Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage
Laura Huang professor at Harvard Business School whose research on interpersonal relationships and implicit bias in entrepreneurship has been featured in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, and Nature.
Sheryl Sandberg – Lean IN
In response to Sheryl’s 2010 TED Talk on the way’s women are held back—and the way that we hold ourselves back—viewers around the world shared their own stories of struggle and success. This overwhelming response inspired Sheryl to write this book. In Lean In, she shares her personal stories, uses research to shine a light on gender differences, and offers practical advice to help women achieve their goals.
Arianna Huffington – Thrive
In Thrive, Arianna Huffington, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post and one of the most influential women in the world, has written a passionate call to arms, looking to redefine what it means to be successful in today’s world.
Peter Thiel – Zero to One: Notes on a Startup
Peter Thiel is a German American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and hedge fund manager. Thiel co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and Elon Musk as well as serving as its CEO. He also co-founded Palantir, of which he is chairman. In Zero To One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.
Linda Hill - Collective Genius
Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She is the faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative and has chaired numerous HBS Executive Education programs.
Dan Pallota – Uncharitable
Daniel M. “Dan” Pallota is an American entrepreneur, author, and humanitarian activist. He is best known for his involvement in multi-day charitable events with the long-distance Breast Cancer 3-Day Walks and Aids Bicycle Rides.
Chris Guillebeau – Side Hustle
Chris Guillebeau is an American nonfiction author, blogger and speaker. He is best known for The Art of Non-Conformity blog and book. He has also written guides for travel and small business topics under the brand Unconventional Guides. He organizes the annual World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon.
Rachel Botsman – How Trust Enables Innovation
Rachel Botsman writes and researches about how technology is transforming trust and what this means for life, work, and how we do business. Who Can You Trust? Is her second book, following the highly acclaimed What’s Mine is Yours.
Beth Comstock – Make Change Work for You
As the woman who initiated GE’s Ecomagination clean-energy and its (and NBC’s) digital transformations, Comstock challenged a global organization to not wait for perfection, but to seek out emerging trends, embrace smart risks and test ideas boldly, and often. She shows how each one of us can become a “change maker” by leading with imagination.
Marie Forleo - Everything is Figureoutable
Marie is an obsessive learner who spends time reading, writing, producing and hosting MarieTV, creating and selling the world’s best online educational programs, running a socially-conscious digital company, and ironically-spending as much time offline as possible.
Jeremy Gutsche - Create the Future
Jeremy Gutsche, MBA, CFA, is the CEO of Trend Hunter -- the world's #1 trend website and innovation consultancy. In total, his team is relied on by 700 brands, billionaires, CEOs and world leaders to predict and create the future, including Google, Sony, Disney, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, IBM and Adidas. He's even helped NASA prototype the Journey to Mars!
Kathy Caprino - The Most Powerful You
Kathy Caprino, MA is an internationally recognized career and leadership coach, writer, speaker, and educator dedicated to the advancement of women in business.
Simon Sinek - Leaders Eat Las
Teaches leaders and organizations around the world about how to inspire people. From members of Congress to foreign ambassadors, from small businesses to corporations like Disney and Intel, from Hollywood to the Pentagon, he has presented his ideas about the power of WHY.
Daniel Pink – The Art of Persuasion and Drive
Daniel H. Pink is a best-selling author and has written five books about business, work, and management that have sold more than two million copies worldwide and have been translated into 35 languages. He is also well recognized for popular TED Talks.
Shepard Fairey and Rich Miner – Free License Open Source Art + Technology
Frank Shepard Fairey is an American contemporary street artist, graphic designer, activist, illustrator and founder of OBEY who emerged from the skateboarding scene. Rich Miner is an investment partner on the GV team. Miner joined the GV team in March 2009 and is based out of Cambridge, MA.
Neil Blumenthal – Success of Warby Parker
Neil Blumenthal is a co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker, a transformative lifestyle brand that offers designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses.
Clayton Christensen – Theory of Disruptive Innovation
Clayton Christensen is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is regarded as one of the world’s top experts on innovation and growth.
Gretchen Rubin – Leveraging Skills/Personality into Entrepreneurship
Rubin is a writer on subjects of habits, happiness, and human nature. She is the author of The New York Times bestsellers Better than Before, Happier at Home, and The Happiness Project. Rubin’s books have sold more than two million print and online copies worldwide in over 30 languages.
Daymond John – Importance of Investing in Black Entrepreneurs
Daymond Garfield John is an American businessman, investor, television personality, author, and motivational speaker. He is best known as the founder, president, and CEO of FUBU, and appears as an investor on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank. John is the founder of The Shark Group.
Nigel Travis – The Pushback Culture
Nigel Travis has forty years of experience as a leader in large and successful organizations, as well as those facing existential crisis-such as Blockbuster as it dawdled in the face of the Netflix challenge. In his ten years as CEO and chairman of Dunkin’ Brands, Travis fine-tuned his ideas about the challenge culture and perfected the practices required to build it..
John Maeda - How to Speak Machine
John Maeda is an American executive, designer, technologist. His work explores the area where business, design, and technology merge to make space for the "humanist technologist."
Adrienne Bankert - Your Hidden Superpower
Adrienne Bankert is an Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning correspondent for ABC News, Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and Nightline. She is also the author of the book Your Hidden Superpower: The kindness that makes you unbeatable at work and connects you with anyone.
Amy Cuddy - Presence
Cuddy is a professor and researcher at Harvard Business School, where she studies how nonverbal behavior and snap judgements affect people from the classroom to the boardroom.
Adam Grant – Give and Take and Originals
Grant is the author of three New York Times bestselling books: Give and Take (2013), Originals (2016), and Option B (2017), co-authored with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Also, in 2016, he delivered a Ted Talk on the habits of original thinkers.
Jessica Herrin - Find Your Extraordinary
Jessica Herrin is CEO and Founder of the Stella & Dot Family of Brands. She has been featured on Oprah, the Today Show, and Undercover Boss, in Fortune, the NY Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and was included on Inc.'s list of top 10 Female CEOs. At the ripe age of 24, she dropped out of Stanford Business School to co-found the leading wedding site, WeddingChannel.com
Jonah Berger - Contagious
Jonah Berger is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is an expert on word of mouth, viral marketing, social influence, and trends.
Richard Florida – The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis
Richard Florida is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals on economic competitiveness, demographic trends, and cultural and technological innovation.
Majora Carter- American Urban Revitalization Strategist
Majora Carter is a visionary voice in city planning who views urban renewal through an environmental lens. The South Bronx native draws a direct connection between ecological, economic and social degradation. Hence her motto: "Green the ghetto!"
Renne Mauborgne – Blue Ocean Shift
In 2005, world renowned professor W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne changed the international business landscape forever with their 100+ week international bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy which would go on to sell more than 3.6 million copies. In Blue Ocean Shift.
Reshma Saujani – Brave, Not Perfect
New York Time’s Bestselling author and Girls Who Code co-founder & CEO, Reshma Saujani, details the societal constructs that encourage men to speak up, get dirty, play rough, and climb to the top while discourage women to take risks, take a stand, to ask for what we want, and even make mistakes. Saujani began her career as an attorney and activist. In 2010, she surged onto the political scene as the first Indian American woman to run for U.S. Congress.
Pauline Brown - Aesthetic Intelligence
Throughout her career Pauline Brown has helped to acquire, build, and lead global luxury brands. Pauline was the Chairman of North America at LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
Arlan Hamilton - It’s About Damn Time
Arlan Hamilton built a venture capital fund from the ground up, while homeless. She is the Founder and Managing Partner of Backstage Capital, a fund that is dedicated to minimizing funding disparities in tech by investing in high-potential founders who are people of color, women, and/or LGBT.
Read. Read. Read.
Connect with content from our past programs.
And support our small independent bookstore and partner Fox Bookshop.
Adrienne Bankert.
Your Hidden Superpower: The Kindness That Makes You Unbeatable at Work and Connects You with Anyone
Adrienne Bankert is a national news correspondent with ABC News who has won two Emmys for her work as an interviewer, reporter, and weekend entertainment anchor on Good Morning America. She’s known for her versatility and ability to connect while reporting on major headlines. She will tell you that the genuine warmth and relatability she exhibits in her interviews comes from the habit of practicing connection and kindness.
Arlan Hamilton.
It's About Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated into Your Greatest Advantage
Arlan Hamilton built a venture capital fund from the ground up, while homeless. She is the Founder and Managing Partner of Backstage Capital, a fund that is dedicated to minimizing funding disparities in tech by investing in high-potential founders who are people of color, women, and/or LGBT. Started from scratch in 2015, Backstage has now raised more than $7 million and invested in more than 130 startup companies led by underestimated founders. In 2018 Arlan co-founded Backstage Studio which launched four accelerator programs for underestimated founders in Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and London.
James McKelvey.
The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time
James McKelvey is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, philanthropist and artist. He is the cofounder of Square, was chairman of its board until 2010, and still serves on the Board of Directors. In 2011, his iconic card reader design was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2017, he was appointed as an Independent Director of the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
Jeremy Gutsche.
Create the Future: Tactics for Disruptive Thinking
Jeremy Gutsche, MBA, CFA, is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning innovation expert, "one of the most sought-after keynote speakers on the planet" (The Sun Newspaper) and the CEO of Trend Hunter -- the world's #1 trend website and innovation consultancy with over 3 Billion views and more than 10,000 innovation projects completed. His team specializes in filtering opportunity and making change happen during times of chaos and change. In total, his team is relied on by 700 brands, billionaires, CEOs and world leaders to predict and create the future, including Google, Sony, Disney, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, IBM and Adidas. He's even helped NASA prototype the Journey to Mars!
Rana el Kaliouby.
Girl Decoded: A Scientist's Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology
Rana el Kaliouby is a pioneer in artificial emotional intelligence (Emotion AI), as well as the cofounder and CEO of Affectiva, the acclaimed AI startup spun off from the MIT Media Lab. She grew up in Kuwait and in Cairo, Egypt, among a family of technologists and educators. After earning an undergraduate and a master’s degree in computer science at the American University in Cairo, she attended Cambridge University, where she earned her PhD. An acclaimed TED speaker, el Kaliouby was named by Forbes to their list of America’s Top 50 Women in Tech, and Fortune included her in their list of 40 Under 40. In 2018 she was the cohost of a PBS Nova series on AI.
Daymond John.
Powershift
Daymond John is CEO and Founder of FUBU, a much-celebrated global lifestyle brand, and a pioneer in the fashion industry with over $6 billion in product sales. He is an award-winning entrepreneur, and he has received over 35 awards including the Brandweek Marketer of the Year, Advertising Age Marketing 1000 Award for Outstanding Ad Campaign, and Ernst & Young's New York Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
