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
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...
Do you have a reading “strategy”? You should. Here’s why.
Did you know that there is a Japanese word for buying books that you don’t read? This habit - one that I exhibit, sadly - is actually so universal that they created a term for it: 積ん読 or tsundoku. It combines the words “tsunde” (meaning “to stack things”), “oku”...
Relinquish one of your – or your company’s – most long-standing ideas
If there was a holy trinity of crucial 21st-century skills, I would personally nominate the following: lifelong learning, stillness (of mind as well as of body) and contrarian (or least critical) thinking. The first one is obvious and the second is becoming more so....
In Praise of Slow Thinking
Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker" As a reaction to fast food (and its more modern incarnation, fast-casual ), a countermovement rose up a number years ago extolling the virtues of ‘ slow food ’. Since then, we’ve seen the emergence of slow fashion, slow cities and perhaps...
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TWEETS by @IonValis
Check out my latest article: Do you have a reading "strategy"? You should. Here's why. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-you-have-reading-strategy-should-heres-why-ion-valaskakis via @LinkedIn
Stuck in a Pleasant Present? Here are 7 Strategies for getting out of a personal or professional rut. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stuck-pleasant-present-here-7-strategies-getting-out-rut-valaskakis via @LinkedIn
Stuck in a Pleasant Present? Fear not - here are 7 Strategies for overcoming Status Quo Bias https://link.medium.com/JC4UyOT04V
"Boiling the Ocean" is the podcast where we apply the management consultant’s toolkit to everyday problems. But many other industries have mental models that can help us improve our work and life. So from time to time, we will interview successful people…https://lnkd.in/emaYA7r
Going to holiday parties this year? Don’t “network”. Instead, be a “network capitalist”. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/going-holiday-parties-year-dont-network-instead-ion-valaskakis/?published=t
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