SPEAKING TOPICS

SPEAKING TOPICS AND OUTCOMES

Kaihan is a sought after speaker and facilitator in a number of fields, including business strategy, disruptive growth strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership, and corporate entrepreneurship.

Working with Kaihan is easy and straightforward with no surprises. It can be expected that you will have at least one planning call before the actual event with Kaihan so he can ask questions to really understand your industry, strategy, and vision. He strives to exceed expectations for every speech or workshop he gives. Anyone that has worked with Kaihan will mention the great lengths he will go to in order to customize his talk to your industry and carefully select material that will resonate with the audience.

Most of the following programs can be offered in three standard formats, but can also be customized based on your event or program requirements.

Standard program formats

1- to 2-hour keynote speech
Half-day or full-day workshop
Multi-day session

1. Outthink the Competition

Based on his most recent book, Outthink the Competition, Kaihan delivers a set of proven business strategy tools he has used with more than 300 clients to create innovative growth ideas, ideas that increase revenue, profit, and the trajectory of your career. Blending together first-hand stories of inspiring business and social innovators, from Elon Musk to Noble Peace Prize winner Mohammad Yunus, Kaihan’s presentation will teach you a tested method that will help your company develop innovative growth ideas that will make you more competitive and unlock growth.

You will learn:

How to reactivate your ability to Outthink
Find a “Fourth Option”: the option beyond the obvious choices, the option others will not see or respond to
New strategic patterns that reveal new strategic options
The Outthinker playbook: five strategic narratives you want to master now:
1. Move early to the next battleground
2. Coordinate the uncoordinated
3. Force two-front battles
4. Be good
5. Create something out of nothing

A simple approach to turn “crazy” ideas into winning moves
Build a culture of Outthinking- strategic and innovative thinking

2. Intrapreneurship: Driving Innovation from Within

“Innovation” brings to our mind the maverick entrepreneur who quits their job, at unimaginable odds, to build a business on their own. The business leaders we most admire – Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey – follow remarkably similar paths. They left school or a career; they were passionate to solve a problem; they faced daunting hurdles; they fought through a jungle of disbelief, self-doubt, and sometimes betrayal; and ultimately they came out smiling on the other end.

But this entrepreneurial story is a myth.

Kaihan argues that intrapreneurs – employees who incubate new businesses within corporations – have had a far greater impact on the world. Nearly all of the most transformative innovations over the past three decades, from e-mail and the Internet to DNA sequencing and MRI scans, were introduced by employees who did not quit their jobs but instead took the challenge of innovating from within.

Drawing on in-depth research of hundreds of successful innovators soon to be released in his next book, Change the World without Quitting your Job, Kaihan outlines the seven key steps to drive innovation inside your organization:

Shift your mindset
Build a strategic idea filter
Generate disruptive IDEAS
Embrace the New Lean: run a strategic experiment
Construct a business model that disrupts the competition, but not yourself
Apply political acumen to rally a groundswell of support
Rapidly scale with an agile team

You will learn:

How to navigate organizational barriers and deploy new and disruptive ideas
How shift your organiztational mindset and culture to challenge the outdated status-quo
How to assemble an agile team to drive growth
The New Lean- a process for agile experimentation
How to tap into the hidden talent of your employees and unlock the value of their ideas into your company

3. "Innovating Beyond Product" or "Innovating Across 8 Dimensions"

When we say “innovation” we almost always mean “product innovation.” We talk about research & development and possible new solutions to meet unmet needs. This is a one-dimensional and incomplete approach to innovation. Dissect the most innovative companies of the last decade and you will see that great innovators disrupt their markets by reaching beyond the product. Oftentimes their success rests on choices that have little to do with new products.

In this presentation, Kaihan will take you through engaging examples from a broad array of industries such as Urban Outfitters in apparel, IKEA in furniture, VMware in technology, SpaceX in space launch vehicles, MasterCard in payments, and Vistaprint in printing services, showing how companies that outperform their competition seek disruptive innovation across eight dimensions (8Ps):

Positioning: how can you own a position your competitors will resist copying?
Product: where can you underperform to outperform somewhere else?
Price: how can you change the basis of pricing?
Place: what new channels will surprise your market?
Promotion: how can you achieve a radically lower customer acquisition cost?
Processes: what small process can produce disruptive transformations?
Physical Experience: how can you innovate what customers see, smell, feel, hear, or taste?
People: can you rethink hiring, organizing, incentivizing, or culture to create a sustained advantage?

The "8Ps" framework has proven to be a powerful structure to engage high-level marketers and business strategists in an exploration of where competitive advantages lie and where to strengthen them. The approach has been used successfully in companies ranging from L’Oreal and Nestle Purina to Microsoft and United Technologies.

From this session, you will walk away with an understanding of:

How to uncover new avenues for growth and innovation
How to construct a disruptive business model
The 8P strategic innovation framework
How to build the confidence to apply new strategies everyday across all business units and roles

4. Winning the Future of Finance

The financial services industry - from banking to payments to insurance - today is undergoing a rapid, historic transformation. Never before have so many disruptions hit the industry so rapidly, from fin-tech to regulation to consumer/ investor behavior. Kaihan works with many of the world's leading financial institutions, helping them make sense of the future and design strategies to win. In this keynote, Kaihan uses first-hand experience and actionable insights to present a compelling vision of the future world of financial services and leaves the audience with tools and an approach to develop a strategy to succeed in the 21^st century.

You will learn:

The key macro-trends that will shape the industry, from blockchain to millennial investors to artificial intelligence and beyond
The five key strategies today's most successful firms are adopting to adapt to, and lead, tomorrow
What financial services will look like in the near and distant future
How to evolve into a more agile, inspiring, disruptive competitor, built for 21^st Century success
Tools and a process for developing concreate ideas for a strategy and approach that could disrupt the industry

5. Disrupting Retail

The retail and apparel industries today are undergoing a rapid, historic transformation. Kaihan works at the cutting edge of the disruption, helping many of the world's leading retail and apparel brands navigate a future being shaped by radically shorter times to market, artificial intelligence, personalization, and broad shifts in consumer behavior. Drawing from the latest industry developments moves from Amazon to QVC and stories of yet-under-appreciated new attackers, In this keynote, Kaihan uses first-hand experience and actionable insights to present a compelling vision of the future world of retail and leaves the audience with tools and an approach to develop a strategy to succeed in the 21^st century.

You will learn:

The key macro-trends that will shape the apparel and retail industries
The five key strategies today's most successful retail and apparel players are adopting to prepare for tomorrow
An overview of what retail will look like in the near and distant future
How to evolve into a more agile, disruptive competitor, built for 21^st Century success
Tools and a process for developing concreate ideas for a strategy and approach that could disrupt the industry

6. Strategic Acumen

According to a study of 60,000 managers across 140+ counties, your ability to think strategically is the most important business leadership trait you can show – more important than your innovativeness, influence, communication skills, or ability to get things done. Based on a course developed for the Wharton Business School, leveraging his proprietary research, Kaihan will ground you in the strategic concepts you must master to create a competitive advantage for your business or company. This motivating presentation will help your company to develop leaders ready to navigate the unpredictable changes of the rapidly evolving business landscape.

Participants will achieve three objectives:

Understand the role of competitive advantage in growing your company’s value
Understand and be able to facilitate a team through a process that leads to more innovative, strategic solutions
Become fluent in the key strategic concepts proven most essential for creating a competitive advantage

7. Mental Agility

In a world marked by accelerated change and innovation, mental agility has proven to be a critical driver of success in sports, warfare, business, career, and life. Yet few agree on what exactly “mental agility” is or know how to develop it. Companies that fail to move on quickly enough from their linear organization will not succeed. In this presentation, Kaihan will share insights from his study of more than 200 successful innovators, showing the key practices that distinguishes those with high mental agility from the rest of the pack.

You will learn how to:

Connect the unconnected: Pulling together seemingly unrelated pieces of information to rapidly form a mental image of the situation or opportunity. What an Air Force pilot and rocket entrepreneur can teach you about seeing what others cannot (yet) understand.
Uncover unexpected causes: Drilling down into the system to see the cause others overlook. What the Washington Monument and the search for clean energy reveal about the power of finding uncommon causes.
Shift your frame: Shifting your frame on the problem to reveal solutions others overlook. How chess players, sports strategists, and entrepreneurs apply patterns to outthink challenges.
Question the impossible: Why we fall into mental “traps” of false beliefs that prevent us from seeing what is possible and, more important, how to dig out of the trap that is keeping you from seizing the solution. Why the Oscars, record players, and personal computers should never have been.

8. The Strategic Power of Doing Good

Historically, we were taught corporations existed for one purpose: to maximize shareholder value. But companies are waking up to the realization that such a focus destroys shareholder value over the long term because it creates resistance to their growth. Based on proprietary research for his forthcoming book, Kaihan shows that today’s most successful companies are the ones that speak of the strategic power of appealing to all stakeholders. If you design a strategy that benefits shareholders by also benefiting employees, the community, the country, and the environment, you have designed the ultimate strategy. When everyone wants you to win, you remove all competition.

This inspirational presentation shows how the idea goes beyond social responsibility. It points us toward removing the idea that doing good and making profit are inconsistent. You do not have to choose. Pulling together stories from organizations ranging from lesser-known jewels like Best Doctors, BrightFarms, and Holstee to leading socially directed corporations like IKEA, MasterCard, and Target, Kaihan will inspire and teach you:

The three primary goals of a “be good” strategy
The three levels of a socially minded strategy
The next evolution of corporate social responsibility
How to embrace a do good culture that creates growth and benefits the bottom-line