Strategies for Anticipation, Acceleration and Reinvention
Ion is a strategic advisor to entrepreneurs and executives. He helps them anticipate the future, accelerate their performance, and reinvent themselves when necessary.
Anticipation
I’m not a historian or a futurist but I stand on their shoulders. Historians study the past to understand the present. Futurists study the present to predict the far future. As a Strategic Advisor, I study the past and present in order to anticipate the near future and recommend better strategies for today.
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Reinvention
Disruption is unwilling change on someone else’s terms. Reinvention is intentional evolution on your own terms. I help individuals and organizations reinvent themselves in response to changing personal, social, economic or technological circumstances.
Acceleration
I train executives and entrepreneurs in how to accelerate their performance by curating and creating game-changing ideas, insights and best practices. I try to upgrade people’s entire operating systems by developing better health, fitness, decision making, habits, routines and processes.
Ion Valis
Is President of Portfolio IV Media and Consulting, a strategic advisory firm with clients worldwide. He has a unique combination of entrepreneurial and executive experience in the public, private and plural sectors. Ion has worked as a Press Secretary on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, helped launch and run a ground-breaking international mobile media initiative at a Fortune Global 50 company in London, served as a senior executive in a fast-growing technology start-up in Montreal, run an international foundation dedicated to public leadership and since 2008 has run his own consulting practice.
The Book
Drawing on his two decades of experience managing people, projects, brands and budgets, as well as 6 years researching leading-edge thinking on peak performance from around the world, Ion has created an innovative personal leadership program and strategic framework that is described in his first book, “The Magnificent Mistake: How You Can Earn More from Failure Than You Learn from Success.”
Recent Posts
COVID-19 is a hard reset for society. Let’s embrace this fresh start.
So many aspects of lives operated on autopilot until recently. Not anymore. The second and third-order effects of C-19 are — for good and for ill — breaking centuries-old habits. The Coronavirus just pressed CTL-Alt-Delete. Let’s embrace this fresh start. Almost...
Don’t pine for a POST-C-19 world. We’re never going back to “normal”. So now what?
Mindset Shift We live in the world C-19 has permanently changed. We need to pivot now from a crisis mindset to a coexistence one. Next, we’ll need to figure out how to capitalize on it. In early March (after SXSW was canceled, before the NBA shut down its season) I...
2020 will be another “Year Without Summer”
Everyone is comparing COVID-19 to 1918 and the Spanish Flu. But I think that the better historical analogy is a century earlier, in 1816. I went to see a theatrical rendition of “Frankenstein” with a friend last night - in part to escape the scary reality that we’re...
The Perils of Being Stuck in a Pleasant Present: 7 Strategies for overcoming Status Quo Bias
“If you are considering a change, you are past the point where you should have made it.” Tyler Cowen, Economist When was the last time you did something for the first time? When was the last time you took a risk, or even diverged from your usual routine? Don’t feel...
Have you ever done a Personal Brand Audit of yourself? You should.
To quote the great urban philosopher Ice-T, “don’t hate the playa, hate the game.” Some people might not like to think that we are “products” that have “brands”, but wishing it away does not make it so. If I say the names “Justin Trudeau” or “Oprah Winfrey”, certain...
Plans are useless but planning is priceless
What maps, plans and Mike Tyson have in common Maps — whether mental ones or cartographic ones — give the illusion of accuracy. But, as the saying goes, the map is not the territory. Only by recognizing the limitations of these constructs can we use them effectively....
Want to be more consistently great? Be like the All-Blacks and have a “Haka”
Here’s a trick borrowed from pro athletes that you can incorporate to become more consistently excellent: have a ritual. You probably don’t watch much rugby, but if you’ve ever seen the New Zealand All-Blacks you no doubt were stunned by their pre-game ritual: the...
We are reaching the end of the beginning of COVID-19. Welcome to the next phase: the Upside Down
I’ve been thinking a lot about how this current phase of the pandemic - and the one that follows - will change us. Unfortunately, I don’t think that we are close to returning to normal. We are instead, to borrow a Churchillian turn of phrase, reaching the end of the...
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TWEETS by @IonValis
Check out my latest article: COVID-19 is a Hard Reset for Society https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/covid-19-hard-reset-society-ion-valaskakis via @LinkedIn
Check out my latest article: Don’t pine for a POST-C-19 world. We’re never going back to “normal”. So now what? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-pine-post-c-19-world-were-never-going-back-so-now-ion-valaskakis via @LinkedIn
Check out my latest article: We are reaching the end of the beginning of COVID-19. Welcome to the next phase: the Upside Down https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-reaching-end-beginning-covid-19-welcome-next-phase-ion-valaskakis via @LinkedIn
I just published my latest think piece on COVID-19: "The Coronapocalypse is a failure of competence, but also of capitalism". Check it out at https://link.medium.com/CDaRz7hPh5 and let me know what you think ~
I just published my own little experience on the fringes of the fight against COVID-19 in California: Scenes from an LA ER in the calm between two storms https://link.medium.com/yvWaKuUs14
SOCIAL MEDIA
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