After a conversation with some of the intended attendants, we decided to try to attract more participants for a full seminar series in conjunction with the full days workshop this Fall. Still, there were too small numbers of people attending. More interest than participation, though, and to give chance for more people to join the learnings and conversation, we finally decided to move the seminar series to the Fall of 2008.

Over the summer, I will author a coherent draft trying to outline the concept in a deeper level, perhaps in collaboration with other potential co-authors in a ‘wiki-book’? Model We are smarter than Me from CCI, MIT - http://www.wearesmarter.org?

Stepping back in order to advance!

See you this coming autumn 2008!

Due to some final tweaking to satisfy client’s schedules, the dates for the final breakfast seminars now have been set. To compensate slightly for the absence of the two-day workshop that was postponed until end of September this Autumn, there will be an introductory seminar that takes the core message originally intended for the one-hour slot May 26 to this morning intro session instead.

The introductory seminar will be focusing where the concept YouFlow stands today in development, its main components and motives, and deliver a rationale for the full outline of the full seminar series ahead during June. This means a slight price increase to cover the added costs for that extra seminar if you intend to attend all of the sessions, now nine instead of eight, spanning from June 3 to June 27.

The added introductory seminar delivered Tuesday, 3 June, 2008 @ 8.00am (breakfast from 7.30am) is titled;

“Identity, Networking and the Power of Social Media – YouFlow in Practice”

Final dates with topics (in Swedish) are presented here.

Final pricing is presented here.

The first intended offline event tomorrow is postponed on public demand.

Many who wanted to come was stuck in the “approaching the end of season”-deadline race, and most people could only attend the breakfast seminars beginning Friday May 30, not the full two-day event tomorrow and the day after (Monday/Tuesday, May 26-27). Of this reason we will run the full two-day workshop beginning next Fall beyond the vacations for a full-fledged inspirational event, and focus only the breakfast seminars before the vacations.

The decision was made after some deep conversations with the key stakeholders: the speakers and the core YouFlow ambassadors and team-members, who all look forward to make the event with renewed power beyond the vacation time – targeting the beginning of September. Give us one week or two, and we will return with new dates!

–

UPDATE: Checking with one key client here in Norrköping, a suggestion is made to target third or rather fourth week of September, 2008. Stay tuned with new dates posted separately in a blog post to come.

Just some minutes ago!

Join here :).

http://snurl.com/youflow-fb-group
   [www_facebook_com]

After a double-booking from Thomas Gad’s side, the final program and outline now has been set.

Since the event is in Swedish first round, the final program is described in detail in Swedish only.

Final outline, though;

May 26:

8-12 Anders Abrahamsson

13-16 Thomas Gad/Anette Rosencreutz

May 27:

9-12 Teo Härén

13-16 Richard Gatarski

Following that reshuffeling was the setup of some new pages in Swedish here on the web (see YouFlow – Introduction (sv) fixed page with two sub-pages regards target groups and pricing/registration).

Next step: Creating a Facebook Group for the Global audience and a Swedish Facebook Event page for the local and country-wide invitees :).

–

UPDATE: Offline Brochure fresh from the print! To be distributed to Norrköping Science Park tomorrow!

Reflowing the Event – after a strategic conversation and discussion, including Richard Gatarski himself, last Monday, the decision was made to make it a two-day event 26-27 May, since many who expressed interest for the big events outside the Locality of Norrköping was forced to choose in between one of the two big days, and since we did not want that to be an option for a non-option, we decided to move the May 5 program to May 26 for the over-night possibilities and developing a better flow. You cannot experience the one without the other, as we also concluded with in the team. Each and every one of the four work-shops have different clues in the detective search what YouFlow is and can be, and to leverage the collective and collaborative wisdom in the development, it has been transformed into an “all or nothing” event, especially giving room for informal off-plenary flows the night in-between, Monday 26 beyond 5pm. This night session will be facilitated using a special meeting format uniting the fun with the development!

Flow On!

Stay tuned for new details!

At the kick-off of this event series, the intention is to get the whole thing in the flow through an “interactive introduction”, or in short – Intro-Active, with me, Anders Abrahamsson, the initiator of the event series.

In the core of my activity stands an idea, a concept – “sustainopreneurship”, or sustainability entrepreneurship, and this concept is reflected by some activity areas, related to different expressions of the concept, in development of it, in applied (inter)action, in its proliferation. A graphical illustration of how these activities relate is presented as an interactive conceptual map with active links reached through my personal homepage http://www.andersabrahamsson.info. You can also read about these different expressions of lines of activity at the dedicated presentation page here at the blog.

But this event series is not about this topic, really. It is rather about the experiences gathered along the way in these lines of activity, that I want to share, merely related to an approach, a “how” aspect of getting you and your message out there in the contemporary challenging environment, where I bring some invited friends and collegues in with their respective expertise shared with different biases and in-depth workshops covering related topics.

The first part of the session is trying to grasp some aspects of the “Landscape of Challenges”, using some tales and narratives, some factual fragments, some models of characterizing the challenges and the environment they occur in, collected with a “macroscope, camera, PC and notebook”.

An interactive networking coffee break follows, an extended break to empower the flows in the audience, before joining again for the second session: “Identity and Networking – YouFlow in Practice”, presenting some central concepts explored through the event series, and also the first round of invited workshop session hosts.

The second half of the full day of May 27, May 26, 2008, will move from “how you can be and work” (with Teo Härén) to “who you are, what you stand for and what your driving forces are”. In other words – your Personal Brand.

It is time to unfold the last set of workshop hosts in the events on this side of the summer season (where introductory dialogue already have begun with potential names for the Autumn season!): Thomas Gad and Anette Rosencreutz.

Thomas and Anette are world-recognized branding experts and consultants both for corporates, organizations and companies, as well as for private high-profile and public persons, and working through their own consultancy firm BrandFlight with offices and partners in London, Moscow, Stockholm, Hamburg, Paris and Johannesburg to name a few.

Together they have authored “Managing Brand Me – how to build your personal brand” (Momentum/Pearson, 2002), where they continue from Tom Peters who coined the “Brand You” concept – in answering how.

Thomas Gad is a very inspirational and experienced branding authority, with more than 20 years’ experience of communication and brand-building. He has worked on brand development, communication and advertising for some of the best known companies in the world, including, Nokia (where he coined one of the most famed brand taglines in contemporary culture, “Connecting People”), Nordea, SAS, Ericsson, Procter & Gamble, Compaq, Microsoft, Skogaholms, Kista Science City, City of Stockholm and Visma (former SPCS). Thomas Gad has developed a unique 4-dimensional method of creating, transforming and maintaining brands and published this in the bestselling book “4D Branding”, with a foreword by Sir Richard Branson (Financial Times/ Prentice Hall, London 2001), and also works today with a personal coach for corporate leaders.

Anette Rosencreutz is a brand strategist specialized on personal branding. She is an experienced brand- and communications expert, also with a big experience of fast-growing entrepreneurial businesses, but has also worked with companies such as Ericsson, Swedish Foreign Ministry, Europolitan Stores (now Telenor) and Visma (formerly SPCS). She has a wealth of practical experience in stimulating change, both with organisations and as a personal coach to public persons. With a background in psychology, advertising and copywriting she has experience with cultural change in connection with mergers and acquisitions. Anette Rosencreutz now combines her experiences of brand building, marketing and personal development in the work of Personal Branding.

Together they will deliver a workshop on building your personal brand in four dimensions – on how to increase strength and clarity both in your personal networking and professional role.

As they say, their concept of personal branding is “a million miles away from ‘what color suit should I wear’ – /…/ this is for smart, intelligent and aspirational professionals”.

In short.

Be smart. Be you. Be (t)here!

—–

More on their topic and all other workshops will be presented in separate blog posts.

Next blog post will be about the event series host and initiator, with a short note on the “intro-active kick-off session” the 5th of May, 2008, Anders Abrahamsson.

It is time to unfold the second name from the list of keynote speakers and workshop leaders in the YouFlow event series: Teo Härén.

A long-standing and enduring advocacy for creativity and how to unleash it, especially in business contexts, is the hallmark for Teo Härén and his twin brother Fredrik. A position that rendered them the prestigeous swedish Speaker of the Year Award 2006, from the swedish Eventakademin (“Event Academy”), called “Narren” (a mini-statue in the Oscar fashion – “the Fool” or the “clown”, a little Harlequin-type in the Swedish cultural history). The first time the prize was shared the same year of two persons :).

Motivation (my translation):

“Few speakers make more speeches than Teo and Fredrik; Teo averages 180 speehces the last years. Fredrik has managed almost 1 000 speeches the last six years in more than 20 countries. /…/But the reason that Teo and Fredrik Härén should win the title Speaker of the Year is that they inspired hundreds of thousands of people all over the country to dare to think different during their creativity speakers. They burn to transfer the message about the value in developing your creativity. They get the swedish people to dare a little bit more. Or as one headmaster recently stated after one of their speeches: ‘When you heard the brothers Härén, you change as a person’”.

Do you dare to change? Then, this is a workshop for you.

–

The topic, besides creativity, that has been returning in the speeches of Teo the last years beyond the publishing of the related book, is the concept of “Here-working”, in swedish Härarbeta. In short, it means “work where you work at your best”. If it means to work on a terrace in Sri Lanka, at the top of a castle in Scotland, or at the closest pillow-floor-equipped café around the corner of your regular office block – work there. There is an obvious connection to the creativity-at-work message and “here-working”.

For our YouFlow workshop he has promised to deliver a workshop with an exposé of here-working; then, now – and in 2020.

I will return more to Teo’s ‘härarbeta’/'here-working’ paradigm when the topics of respective workshop are presented in more detail during the course of the coming days, together with the final title of his contribution.

Short bio: Teo Härén is general manager at Interesting.Org, the first idea broker firm in Europe, founded 2000. He has evaluated more than 30 000 ideas during his years as an idea manager of Interesting.org. During the course of the years, the books, speeches and workshops have been more intense and dominating the business.

In summary. If you want an idea evaluated, Teo is probably the right person to ask!

As mentioned in the first post and in the about page, this blog is an ongoing companion to to the offline events related to the themes covered by this blog. A tag cloud to grasp some key terms will be presented, so there it will be reflected in a snapshot.

From talk and words, to action: It is time to introduce the first keynote speaker – Richard Gatarski.

Quote from his About from his Weconverse blog;

“Dr. Richard Gatarski (born in 1958) pursues his mission “to help us discover, understand and develop social and technological movements”. Closest to his heart lies an idea to help designing the best start in life for our children – where “school” is not the solution.

As a speaker Dr. Richard Gatarski is experimenting with new, inspiring, and mutliple threaded forms of presentations – by some referred to as digital storytelling. The results are thought-provoking illustrations of contemporary life. Richard brings togheter seemingly unrelated subjects, such as meaningfulness, schooling, business and computerization, into an emotionally touching sphere of thoughts. He achieves this by providing insightful demonstrations together with critical reflections. The audience meets issues such as social media, kids as consumers, school branding, a post PC world with artificial market actors and customer conversations in Web 2.0 worlds. Richard’s aim is to offer the audience both subtle and mind blowing insights, sometimes in a provocative fashion, that stimulate exciting conversations.”

[read the full bio over at his blog]

His interactive workshop this time will cover e. g. social media, web 2.0, what it means for me, you and us, and challenges for the contemporary marketing communicator in the networked age. The final title for his exciting contribution will be presented in the full program at the separate and dedicated page here on the event blog, when all speakers have been introduced through separate postings the coming days. You can also trace the emerging speaker presentation page in the event flow.