March 15, 2019 – Grateful August Turak, PriceCoin Eddie Ibanez and Company Culture Gretchen Anderson

March 15, 2019 – Grateful August Turak, PriceCoin Eddie Ibanez and Company Culture Gretchen Anderson

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August Turak – Author with Columbia Business School Publishing & Contributing Writer at Forbes Magazine

We’d like to think that happy people are grateful.
No! Grateful people are happy! 

August Turak is an award-winning author, speaker, consultant and contributor for Forbes. com and the BBC. He is also the founder of the spiritual and educational nonprofit the Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation (SKSF). August retired as a successful entrepreneur and corporate executive. He attributes much of his success to living and working alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey since 1996. As a frequent monastic guest, he learned firsthand from the monks as they grew an incredibly successful portfolio of businesses. His book, Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks, was published in 2013 by Columbia Business School Publishing. When he is not praying and working alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey, he works with his nonprofit and lives on a seventy-five-acre farm near Raleigh, North Carolina.

Eddie Ibanez – CEO of PriceCoin

I saw an opportunity for people to own their data
and make money off of it.

Eddie Ibanez is the CEO of PriceCoin, a travel booking website which allows users to turn bookings into dollars via an innovative earning structure. In addition to claiming points by using their credit card to book travel, consumers are rewarded PriceCoins for each transaction they make, as well as every booking made on the network. The idea of PriceCoin came to Eddie from his previous company, Zenabi. Eddie has always been impressed with blockchain technology and its innumerable number of uses. He decided that putting this technology in the hands of users for real uses, rather than just for cryptocurrency was inevitable. This led Eddie and his team to create PriceCoin, where users are presented with amazing deals on hotels and are rewarded with PriceCoin Rewards for every purchase. It is evident that Eddie brings an unparalleled skill set to the industry, which is clear through his unique career history. Eddie attended MIT and stood out amongst his classmates. Thanks to his academic achievements and innovative thinking. Shortly after, he was recruited out of MIT to work for a government agency to develop software that reverse-engineered the location of known terrorists. This paved the way for his first company and creation, Zenabi, an AI and advanced data analytics company. A few years later, Zeanbi responded to an RFP from Priceline to replace their marketing automation platform with a stronger AI platform. After a one-week Proof of Concept, competing against IBM, Oracle and Palantir, Zenabi won the Priceline project. Priceline then acquired Zenabi in a cash and stock deal.

Gretchen Anderson – Director at the Katzenbach Center and Author of The Critical Few: Energize Your Company’s Culture by Choosing What Really Matters

 There is an awareness that culture is something that everyone
needs to deal with. How do you do that? 

In The Critical Few: Energize Your Company’s Culture by Choosing What Really Matters (Berrett-Koehler, Jan 15, 2019), leadership experts Jon Katzenbach, Gretchen Anderson and James Thomas identify four critical elements in a company’s culture that can catalyze true evolution: traits, keystone behaviors, authentic informal leaders, and metrics that encourage a self-reinforcing cycle of lasting change. By identifying and focusing on these, leaders can set a clear direction, inspire their people, and evolve their work cultures.