Karl Albrecht is well known for presenting powerful ideas in a powerful way.

But don't call him a "motivational speaker" — he believes it's the big ideas that move people, not platform histrionics.

No "canned" speeches — every lecture is an original, designed for the occasion and incorporating his latest thinking.

Self-described as "constitutionally incapable of specializing in only one subject per lifetime," he writes and lectures about the ideas that matter to him. Here are a few of the big ideas you might want him to share with your people.

Karl Albrecht declares that "More people have lost jobs, friends, and mates as a result of social incompetence than for any other reason." Drawing upon the work of Harvard Professor Howard Gardner, who pioneered the concept of "multiple intelligences," Karl has explored and developed the dimension of interpersonal intelligence, which he characterizes as social intelligence. He defines Social Intelligence as the ability to get along well with others, and to get them to cooperate with you. In this thought-provoking and inspiring presentation, he shares his "S.P.A.C.E." model of social intelligence from his book Social Intelligence: the New Science of Success. S.P.A.C.E. portrays five critical dimensions of "SI" as Situational Awareness, Presence, Authenticity, Clarity, and Empathy. Going well beyond the usual cliches about "people skills," he challenges his audience to think carefully about their "SQ." He offers participants a brief mini-assessment, based on his popular Social Intelligence Profile instrument, and shares stories, examples, personal insights, and strategies for embarking on a life-long commitment to developing social intelligence and effectiveness in dealing with others.

The Four Secrets of the World's Longest-Surviving Companies. Karl Albrecht reminds executives, managers, and business leaders at all levels: "We'll get the future we deserve; the challenge is to deserve the future we want." According to a study by the Royal Dutch Shell Corporation, the average life of a Fortune 500 company is less than 50 years. The average life of all incorporated businesses is less than 15 years. How long will your organization stay in business? Karl leads his audience through a fascinating exploration of the four simple but profound secrets that have enabled the world's oldest companies to survive and thrive for a century or more. He shares strategies for dealing with technological change, social and political change, generational diversity, preserving and evolving a healthy culture, and capitalizing on opportunities.

How to Use the "Strategic Conversation" to Guide Your Business. Drawing upon more than 25 years of research and experience, as presented in his landmark books The Northbound Train: Finding the Purpose, Setting the Direction, Shaping the Destiny of Your Organization and Corporate Radar: Tracking the Forces That Are Shaping Your Business, Karl Albrecht shares his "strategic radar" model and shows you how to map the future of your enterprise. He offers a simple but useful model terms of eight critical "radar sectors," or dimensions of the business environment, i.e. the Customer Environment, Competitor Environment, Economic Environment, Technological Environment, Social Environment, Political Environment, Legal Environment, and Geophysical Environment. He shares the eight "super-trends" that will shape the business landscape, creating golden opportunities from some enterprises and destructive threats to others. He shows how to spot and evaluate the critical trends that can make or break your business. He challenges executives, managers, entrepreneurs and other business leaders to translate these driving forces into meaningful opportunities for their organizations. He helps his audiences begin to think like skilled futurists, and to map their own futures.

Building the Self-aligning Organization. When executives decide to lead and guide their organizations on a challenging journey of change and development, they need an inspiring concept — a sense of meaning and purpose. They also need a conceptual frame of reference for capturing the imagination of their people and giving them something to aim for. This, according to Karl Albrecht, is the "Journey to Excellence." According to Karl, "Every culture has, in its story-telling tradition, the archetypal concept of the hero's journey — a voyage of trial, challenge, and even danger, which leads the hero to discover his or her inner strength and resources. In the most popular of our mythological stories, such as 'The Wizard of Oz,' the people making the journey find their inner resources through the journey itself, not at some hoped-for destination. So it is with organizational change and evolution: the journey itself transforms the organization and its people." Karl has mapped out a transcendant process for planned change — the Journey to Excellence, or "J2E." In this presentation, he inspires leaders to conceive of their own Journey to Excellence, and explains the key principles for building a self-aligning organization — one that expresses the vision and meaning at all levels, in all hearts and minds, and in all systems and methods. He explains how to captivate the imagination of employees by empowering them to translate the vision and mission into their own personal journeys for themselves and their organizational units.

Managing in Knowledge Cultures. Karl Albrecht declares that "It's not the Third Wave any more; we're passing into Wave 3.1 - the commoditization of information. Information is rapidly becoming a profitless commodity and knowledge is becoming the new competitive advantage." According to Albrecht's Law, "Intelligent people, when assembled into an organization, will tend toward collective stupidity." This challenging speech, based on his ground-breaking book The Power of Minds at Work: Organizational Intelligence in Action, invites leaders at all levels to cure “collective stupidity” and capitalize on the total brain power of their organizations. Going beyond fad concepts like "knowledge management," Karl Albrecht introduces your leaders to his seven dimensions of Organizational Intelligence, and challenges them to see their enterprise through new eyes. He defines "OI" as "... the capacity of an enterprise to mobilize all of its brain power, and to focus that brain power on achieving the mission." His executive perspective on OI includes four key "enablers" that can continually improve the capacity of any enterprise to succeed in its environment. He shares inspiring and revealing stories, cites important cases, and offers his personal insights, gained in a 25-year career as a consultant and executive advisor.

It's Time to Upgrade Your Mental Software. According to Karl Albrecht, "For the first time in the history of our species, our environment is evolving faster than our brains." We need to learn new modes, patterns, and habits of thought. In today's new Knowledge Economy, the key leaders will be thought leaders — those who can move others to action by the power and clarity of their ideas. To borrow a figure of speech from the technological realm, it's all about upgrading your "mental software" — the set of thinking habits and methods you've learned to use in your career and personal life. Many people stopped upgrading their mental software after their last formal educational experience, but we can no longer get by with what we knew in the past. Based on his landmark book Practical Intelligence: the Art and Science of Common Sense this stimulating and thought-provoking speech challenges and inspires your people to think about thinking. According to Karl Albrecht, “Thinking is a bodily function.” We don’t have one mind — we have many of them, and by learning to call on the special resources each mind has to offer, we can perceive, react, reflect, and behave as whole persons. We can free ourselves from automatic “signal” reactions, destructive emotions, threats to our self-esteem, and the programming signals of our society and culture. The result is greater mental, physical, and spiritual health.

Sanity is Inevitable. This provocative and inspiring speech holds out hope for a better world. “Sanity is inevitable,” says Karl Albrecht. “Human beings can be counted on to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.” The first of Alvin Toffler’s three great socioeconomic waves was agriculture; the second was industrialization; the third — upon us now — is information. The fourth wave, according to Karl Albrecht, will be the wave of consciousness — the “Brain Wave.” The last unexploited resource in business is the gray matter. Organizations have invested billions of dollars in information technology — machine software. Now it’s time to invest in the human software. Brain research has given us a wealth of new possibilities for developing the career skills of our people. It’s up to us to put it to use.