My itinerary?  Starting from home base of Boston, then to New York’s JFK, through London, with the ultimate destination– Singapore.  Total air time one way? 18 hours.  Total air and waiting in airport time one way? 24 hours.

What earned me the opportunity?  First, membership in the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (“EO,” www.eonetwork.org, formerly known as YEO, or Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization ) a global membership organization that is nearing 10,000 members across more than a 100 chapters.  EO is one of a group of leadership organizations, including YPO, WPO, CEO, and several others.  Qualifications for EO membership include annual revenues of $1 million or more, and either founder or majority ownership status in your business.

Hailing from the Boston chapter of 100 or so EO members made up of computer software and hardware entrepreneurs, legal and staffing professional services business owners, and a host of other small business founders  including franchising, travel, consulting, real estate, and medical devices, I was made aware of the strategic partnership between British Airways and the EO organization.  The following paragraph, detailing what a face-to-face opportunity would mean to the growth and expansion of our boutique retained executive search firm, BSG Team Ventures, was what I jotted down–

We have a presence in Boston, New York, Silicon Valley, and London. These are key global innovation centers. However, there is clearly a fifth and/or sixth  location to round out our client value proposition of “on the ground coverage in the key innovation centers in the world”– and those are India and Asia. Although there is a term sometimes used that combines the two (“Chindia”), we feel that there is perhaps a need to be able to service our growth-stage clients in each. One alternative is a meaningful position in a location like Singapore, which is equidistant from both these key innovation markets.

The ability to set up a series of meetings with potential partners, and then bring pre-meeting calls and video conferences to an in-person, face-to-face setting, would be extremely meaningful in taking our business from EU-American only, to truly global, capable of better servicing the needs of our clients who continue to demand the need to themselves expand globally.

I had been to Singapore and Hong Kong in 2008 on business, and knew that another trip there would allow us to cement some developing relationships “face-to-face.”  In 2008, we completed a VP Worldwide Sales search based out of Singapore, and are now working on another General Manager search based out of Tokyo for a leading global technology innovator.  And with the recession of 2008-2009 projected to recover in west-bound fashion this time (Asia first, Europe second, and the U.S. last), China, Japan, and the rest of the Asia-Pacific corridor is important to every business, both large or small like ours.

Having won the right to cash in the BA offer, a plane load of entrepreneurs amassed down at JFK airport in New York.  BA was everything they’ve built their reputation on-service-oriented and courteous, only as the British can be-with a send off in the first-class lounge that was rich in food, spirit(s), networking with other entrepreneurs, and a few humor-filled greetings speeches by both British Airways officials and the British government.   Example of the power-networking in the BA lounge? I met up with Morgen Newman, co-founder of IdeaPaint, another Boston-based start-up that was a BA travel recipient, with a company out of Babson (my alma mater so plugging here) that has formulated a special paint that can be applied on any work surface that then functions as a “whiteboard,” completely erasable when using dry-erase markers.  IdeaPaint is a tool for entrepreneurs that simply brilliant.  Most entrepreneurs are visual thinkers, and this now allows us to scribble on every surface…. (“Beware office cleaners-these walls aren’t “dirty”…. DO NOT ERASE!”)

My itinerary and goals for the trip looked like the following:

-          Tuesday:  Departure from JFK New York on flight into Heathrow, England, arriving at 9:30pm, with champagne reception at the end at the hip Sofitel Hotel in the new BA swanky Terminal 5.  “Bubbly” is the right term for a plane load of entrepreneurs bottled up for 5-hour trans-Atlantic flight….

-          Tuesday eve: Trip into London to stay at one of BSG Team Ventures’ partner’s flats, Simon Haworth, for early meetings the following morning

-          Wednesday morning: Meetings with an affiliated venture fund Dr. Haworth is a partner of, IPSO Ventures, focused on zero-stage technology transfer out of UK universities

-          Wednesday lunch: meeting with Simon and additional BSG Team Ventures staff in UK to review firm-wide global priorities

-          Wednesday dinner: Meeting with Sean Sean-Rogers, venture capitalist originally based in Boston with Commonwealth Ventures, then London with Benchmark Capital, and now out with his first cool media start-up venture fund of his own, called PROfounders Capital .

-          Wednesday late eve: Flight out of Heathrow to Singapore

-          Thurs eve: arrive in Singapore 13 hours later but given time zones crossed, a full calendar day later.  On way to hotel, bump into another fellow EO Boston chapter member, Warren Katz, who’s military software simulation company MAK Technologies based in Cambridge, MA was recently bought by a Singaporean company and where he had meetings completely unrelated to anything to do with EO, British Airways etc.  The probability of bumping into a fellow Bostonian and dear friend 9,500 miles and 15 hours away from home in the same hotel lobby in Singapore is….. rough math? Zero.  If anything proved Thomas Friedman’s claim that “the world is flat,” this certain did.  Serendipity works in strange ways.

-          Thurs late eve: After a run on the treadmill and a shower at the hotel to shake off the jet lag, meet-up with Warren at the hip Equinox Bar at the top of the SwissHotel in downtown Singapore for a nightcap on the 70^th floor overlooking the city (Warren holding porcelein statue of a lion, the symbol of Singapore, as proof of authenticity and handy memory jogger for old age).

-          Friday day: Meetings with the Singapore Economic Development Board regarding the state of the cleantech industry in Singapore, and the Ignite Clean Energy Competition I currently chair.  Potential partnership with Singapore on global cleantech competition expansion.  This was followed by three meetings with boutique retained executive search firms with a similar focus and specialization to our own firm.  Great meetings.  All three firms turned out to be potential partner-caliber opportunities.  And each of them had active retained executive recruiting practices that did search work in India, Singapore, Mainland China, Hong Kong and Korea.

-          Saturday:  Meeting with existing technology client who went public earlier in 2009 for lunch to discuss current and future expansion searches both in the U.S. and Asia

-          Sunday:  Originally, I had booked the trip to try to squeeze in one more business day by staying the weekend and leaving late Monday eve to allow for more business meetings.   However, once there, was greeted with the fact that Monday was a holiday, the end of Ramadan for the Muslim religion, and business was closed.  It’s a great example of Singapore as an Indo-Chinese melting pot not dissimilar to that of the United States.  However, in Singapore, it is a fusion of Chinese, Malay, and Indian cultures that co-exist and create not only incredible cuisine, but a vibrant cultural diversity where all three associated religions are celebrated and many languages spoken.   Moved from hotel in downtown Singapore out to a small island just 15 minutes out of the city called Sentosa, a former military base built by the British half a century ago to protect the island, now converted to a natural wildlife habitat and recreational weekend playground for Singaporeans with several resorts anchoring each end of the island, dotted with golf courses, tennis, beach, dolphin petting, and lots of beach and water sports.  Note to self-keep windows of hotel room closed….

Ran back into Singapore the city to do some late Sunday shopping, and again bumped into the cultural diversity of Singapore, with a street celebration capping off the end of a period in Chinese culture and I believe Tao religion that starts In May, and ends in September, often referred to as the “Moon Cake” festival.  This is a festival  and celebration on the streets of Singapore and many other parts of Chinese Asia I’m told that celebrates the return of all the ghosts to the underworld who each year are let out to roam the earth and make trouble for their living relatives.  At the end of September, these ghosts are all returned behind the gates to the underworld, rendering the earth safe again until the following May.  The Chinese celebrate with parades, demonstrations, the burning of special urns the night before on the streets, and the Chinese pastry called “Moon Cakes” made up of a bean paste with some sort of frosting over the top.

Below is a picture of several groups of Chinese children rehearsing before the start of the parade.  The boys were part of a martial arts school; not sure what the girls were part depicting.

All said and done,  in 4 business days the dash across the globe was a great opportunity, albeit an exhausting one.

Here’s to entrepreneurship and the pioneers in all facets of enterprise who take on the unknown every day, week, and month, in an effort to forge new business value.  Whether those pioneers are in the U.S., UK, Singapore, or India, we’re all very much the same, driven by a like urge to grow and nurture an emerging idea.  Hats off to the rest of that planeload of globe-trotting entrepreneurs.  Can’t wait to hear their stories no doubt more compelling and inspirational than mine….

Position: General Manager, Simbionix eLearning

Reports to: CEO, Simbionix USA

Location: Denver, CO

Website: www.simbionix.com

“Virtual reality simulation in surgical training has become more widely used and intensely investigated in an effort to develop safer, more efficient, measurable training processes…If executed properly, virtual reality offers inherent advantages over other training systems in creating a realistic surgical environment and facilitating measurement of surgeon performance.” – E. Seymour and J.S. Rotnes, Surgical Endoscopy (2007)

“If we’re going to make a mistake, let’s make it on the simulators first.” - Dr. Karl Illig, Chief of Vascular Surgery at Strong Medical Center, Rochester, NY, on why physicians are eager to start using the new Simbionix PROcedure Studio simulator

“If the learning actually matters, use simulations. If it doesn’t, don’t worry about it.” - Clark Aldrich, founder of SimuLearn, industry visionary, and author of numerous articles and books on simulations and e-learning

SIMBIONIX IN THE NEWS

http://www.simbionix.com/News.html

http://www.simbionix.com/PROcedure.html

THE COMPANY

Surgical simulators have been developed in the past few years to enhance the training of physicians, reduce the number of animals and cadavers, and provide flexible training scenarios and preoperative planning. Despite their potential benefits, and the fact that they have precedence in flight simulators, there are very few simulators in current use globally. Simbionix as a leadership company in this growing industry is changing the medical training landscape.

As a world leader in the field of medical education and simulation technology, Simbionix offers the most comprehensive medical training experience available, using the latest software and hardware technology. The company’s state-of-the-art technology provides surgeons, interventionists, nurses, and technicians with a robust platform to learn and master critical skills to ensure procedural efficiency and promote quality patient outcomes. The systems offer a range of basic and highly advanced procedures, and incorporate detailed and complete metrics for skill assessment.

The user is free to practice skills and perform procedures until the required proficiency is attained. In addition, difficult and uncommon procedures may be practiced at any time. This maximizes consistency to optimize learning, providing a clear advantage over relying solely on previous ly available patient training methods.

History and Products

Established in 1997 by a small group of individuals with a multi-disciplinary background in marketing, software programming and 3-D graphics, the company developed the GI Mentor™, the industry’s first computer-based simulator for training endoscopic procedures skills.

Since then, Simbionix has successfully launched a complete line of medical simulators that provide medical professionals with hands-on training in a comprehensive array of Minimally Invasive Surgery procedures. This includes the URO Mentor™ — the industry’s only simulator for endourology procedures; the PERC Mentor™ for percutaneous access procedures; the LAP II Mentor™ — a multi disciplinary simulator for laparoscopic skills and surgery procedures recognized as the industry gold standard; and the ANGIO Mentor™–a multidisciplinary simulator that provides hands-on practice in an extensive and complete simulated environment of interventional endovascular procedures. Today Simbionix has progressed to the “next” generation of simulation, developing and launching PROcedure Rehearsal Studio, the first “patient specific” simulation in the industry.

Simbionix simulation products have been validated in several scientific studies and the company cooperates closely with both industry and leading medical institutions such as Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and other international institutions to develop the most advanced simulators for the training and assessment of medical professionals.

About Simbionix eLearning Division

Recognizing the ongoing trends in the certification of clinicians in a range of MIS procedures that are becoming more complex, Simbionix acquired eTrinsic, a leader in education content development. Together with the Mentor platforms, Simbionix began providing a comprehensive solution (called the MentorLearn platform) for the training and eventual certification of physicians in advanced surgery skills in a safe and controlled environment, increasing patient safety and procedure efficiency.

Currently, the medical course content division of Simbionix (now branded as a division of Simbionix) specializes in developing online medical education products for professional education, including training modules and assessment tools. This division’s products are designed for manufacturers of medical devices, who use the company’s products to launch their own products and train their customers as well as sales representatives, physicians, and clinicians.

Simbioniox’ medical eLearning division combines its proven content development process with an understanding that adult learning is fundamentally different from learning created for the captive audience of children. Adult learning for physicians, clinicians, and medical device employees requires the information design to be more practical, more concise, and extremely intuitive and realistic to the end user. With this in mind, the course content division uses proprietary learning methodology developed over years, allowing the learner to apply his/her knowledge in a practical and hands-on way in the course of the online learning experience.

COMPANY INVESTORS

About River Cities

River Cities Capital Funds is a venture capital firm based in Cincinnati, Ohio with an office in Raleigh, North Carolina.  It has raised nearly $400MM in four venture funds since being founded in 1994, and has backed over 80 portfolio companies, located mainly in the Midwest and Southeastern regions of the U.S.  River Cities invests behind exceptional management teams in expansion stage companies in healthcare and information technology that have unique technology or services and strong market positions, with a special emphasis on recurring revenue business models.  For more information, please visit www.rccf.com.

About Early Stage Partners

Early Stage Partners is an early stage venture capital firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. The company invests in promising opportunities in instrumentation and control technology, life sciences, advanced materials, energy, information technology, and electronics. The company’s principals have over one hundred years combined experience in early stage company formation and development, with a significant network of relationships throughout the United State that can be used to attract management, develop strategic partnerships, and provide later stage funding. For more information, please visit www.esplp.com.

THE CHALLENGE

As part of its post-funding expansion plans, Simbionix will be hiring a senior executive to drive its new direction into the eLearning world and training market sector in Denver. This General Manager will have overall responsibility for developing a commercial business plan and establishing, building, and managing a successful global eLearning business focused on a wide range of medical training markets—medical school, hospital, and clinics, as well as publishers and other re-sellers—and leveraging Simbionix’ world-class simulation archive of courses and equipment. The goal of the company is to develop a recurring revenue model.

Reporting to CEO, the new General Manager will work with the CEO and his leadership team to quickly build Simbionix’s eLearning division into a $20M – $50M operation. The new GM will use his or her previous expertise and knowledge of the eLearning world to identify and develop a new eLearning market sector for the company that integrates its core medical simulation technology.

Critical to his/her success will be the ability to combine the company’s core medical simulation products within the eLearning environment, assess market trends and opportunities, and move aggressively to create a new businesses that exploits these opportunities. This requires not only strategic vision but also the ability to establish an appropriate sales distribution model and possibly develop partnership and joint venture relationships. Success will be measured by a combination of growth, profitability, and ultimately enhancement of company value.

Reporting to the new GM will be a current staff of fewer than twenty employees, including project managers, data base experts, graphic artists, other technical employees and sales representatives.

Specific responsibilities and expectations include the following:

• Develop an eLearning business plan and commercial model that includes a re-occurring revenue component
• Identify market opportunities associated with the Simbionix core simulation business, integrate these, and develop a comprehensive business plan for creating revenue streams in medical training for each of these markets
• Leverage previous contacts within the eLearning/Training space to develop partnerships and possibly joint ventures that could jump start entry into these various markets
• Establish an effective eLearning Sales and Distributions organization focused on these markets
• Move quickly to implement these plans and strategies within the limitations of resources and budgets
• Manage this businesses profitably while achieving rapid growth in revenues
• Operate as “Pied Piper”—recruiting and mentoring talent into the organization from previous companies as well as other eLearning companies
• Work effectively and harmoniously within a matrix organization with the team in Denver, Israel, and, most importantly, the CEO in the Company’s HQ’s in Cleveland, as well as other senior managers.
• Ability to present well and coherently

It is important to note that the company has more than ten years of technology development and twelve years of operating history delivering world-class core simulation products and training solutions to the medical market.

THE CAREER OPPORTUNITY

To an experienced builder-leader executive, this opportunity offers several attractive features:

• Opportunity to establish and manage a profitable, rapidly growing division, with significant ownership stake and company value strongly influenced by the GM’s performance
• The opportunity to create an enterprise, not just optimize what someone else built—to help lead and grow a cutting edge, state-of-the-art eLearning business
• The opportunity to join a small executive team and have “a seat at the table” as the company charts its future
• Strong, committed investors and Board that is willing to fund growth
• The opportunity to gain both domestic and international experience since the company is a true globally-focused operation with an installed base and activities in more than 35 countries around the world
• The opportunity to work in the attractive, thriving city of Denver

THE IDEAL CANDIDATE

The ideal candidate currently is the General Manager, COO, President, or other senior operating executive of a company that provides eLearning/training solutions. He or she has P&L responsibility and has demonstrated the ability to identify eLearning market trends and products, proven knowledge of the distribution and marketing of eLearning products, and has built a profitable eLearning business.

It is preferable—though not essential– that the candidate have experience with hospitals, clinics, medical schools, and/or other healthcare organizations. What is essential is that he or she have a demonstrated understanding of distribution of web-based training solutions and content (publishers and others), to commercial or, more broadly, to corporate and academic markets.

Specifically, this individual has—

• Significant experience and success managing an eLearning business, ideally from a “best of breed” company
• A strong record of performance taking a company from <$5M to $20M or more as operating manager with P&L responsibility
• An ability to develop a strategic commercial business plan and implement it
• A keen understanding of eLearning distribution
• Experience with functional areas such as product development (IT), product management, marketing, sales management, and business development
• Outstanding general management and leadership skills developed in a fast-paced, dynamic, multi-tasking environment
• Experience in the global eLearning arena
• (Ideally) Experience working in a matrix-type organizational structure with vertical and lateral relationships between colleagues in the US and abroad (in this case, Israel); this requires flexibility and adaptability in a cross-cultured company
• An entrepreneurial spirit–whether within a small or large company; not a “big company mentality”
• A leadership style that is open and transparent, with no BS or hidden agendas
• A team player mentality, with understanding that success comes from his / her integration into the parent company, and in developing close working relationships with the CEO and other senior managers
• A willingness to relocate to Denver if not already located there
• A college degree

This involves a range of personal attributes– flexibility and adaptability; a great work ethic; strong leadership skills with supervision; an ability to develop a strategic commercial plan and implement it; an ability to analyze and evaluate one’s own (and other’s) performance and to develop plans to improve performance; excellent presentation skills; willingness to take responsibility for both success and failure; a thick skin; self-confidence; a positive attitude about self, company, marketplace; and a strong desire for success.

COMPENSATION

Compensation will include salary, bonus, and equity in line with the individual’s experience.

TRAVEL

Travel may be as much as 30 percent initially in addition to any commuting.

Please use the following link to apply:

http://155.212.246.208/JobDescriptionMultiple.asp?WebJobPostingsID=180&chkbox180=chkbox180

Having just finished an executive search for a General Manager of Asia Pacific and EMEA region where the candidate was located in Singapore, who was born and had early childhood in India, and educated and now a citizen of the U.S., the question of global talent trends comes to mind. Is this typical of the future executive leadership puzzle, where pieces will come from around the globe? Reflecting at year’s end on the coming year, and the fact that we’re almost at 2010, we got to thinking about leadership succession and the next generation of leaders we’re grooming. With all the news of layoffs at all levels in the media, and despite the forecasts of some of the toughest economic times America has seen since the Great Depression, there are some really interesting global macro trends that are worth noting when it comes to executive recruiting, and executive talent management in the next few years. And now is probably a really good time to start the planning around the impacts these demographic prognostications may have.

The quick headline is this– Baby Boomers as we all have heard (approximate age range of 42 to 60), are aging. And Boomers make up the vast majority of executive leadership roles in corporate America. This includes Wall Street AND Main Street businesses, large and small. In fact, there is some evidence that more entrepreneurs starting businesses are boomers than any other age group. Boomers are fully one-third of the US population now (US Census) and X generation (54 million, ~17% of U.S. population), Y generation (aged between 18 and 30, about 75 million, clocking in at ~25% of U.S. population), and Z, AA, etc (who knows) generations are smaller due to lower birthrates post-Word War II. As the nextgen executive pool is a much smaller one (see http://www.thefutureofwork.net/assets/Review_of_Workforce_Crisis.pdf), we have to ask the obvious question– where is leadership going to come from in the next 5 to 25 years? Who will drive the U.S. knowledge economy, and can the U.S. continue to sell itself as the global melting pot, successfully continuing to woo other countries’ best and brightest with our promise of streets paved with gold? Or, given the two busts in the last 8 years, one Internet and the other financial markets, is the next generation of leaders going to reverse the brain drain from rest of world to the U.S. to its opposite? We’ve certainly seen recently emerging global powers like China actively push to woo and re-patriate Chinese who had migrated to the U.S. for higher education and opportunity.

What is counter-intuitive to perhaps many however is the demographic shifts and a snapshot of what the global talent marketplace looks like in 2020, a mere 11 years away. We were recently at the IACPR Annual Conference (International Association for Corporate and Professional Recruitment, www.Iacpr.org ), and had the opportunity to hear one of Boston Consulting Group’s Talent Practice leaders, Rosalinde Torres, address this issue.

For a summary of the Boston Consulting Group report pdf, go to www.bcg.com/publications/files/Creating_People_Advantage_Summary_May_2008.pdf. For the visual, look at the world map graphic above. Red circles are countries with a net loss of eligible leadership population by 2020. Green circles are those countries with a net gain. One might think that China would be a big player in future leadership, but with their one-child policy, they’re down 10 million. The U.S. is down 17 million. The possible winner for building the biggest pool of future leaders is India, up 47 million people. This is almost more than all the rest of those countries with net positive growth combined.

Food for thought as we go about building executive teams for 2009, 10 and deep into the next decade.