Dateline: Charlotte, North Carolina
Our longtime associate, Carlos Salum, is adding to his reputation in Europe as a high-profile coach of top-echelon executives. He’s just returned from his latest triumph in Zurich, in fact.
The invitation-only event he pulled together was attended by 18 CEOs of multinational organizations, NGO leaders, professors and managing directors/partners of top-tier leadership consulting companies. 
This included such organizations as UBS, Swiss Re, Zurich University of Applied Science, Gitronica iGuzzini, Danube Foods Group, Right Livelihood Award Foundation, Innatura, Stariade, UPS Zdrowie, Swiss Management Association, ATKearney, Manres, Gentinetta-Scholten, Vendbridge and the Julius Baer Foundation. Also attending was Walter Kohl, son of the former Chancellor of Germany, who is an expert in dialogue and reconciliation.
Carlos calls his undertaking for top-level executives and consultants in Switzerland “The Zurich International Sircle.” That’s a clever spinoff from the acronym for Carlos’ company, Salum International Resources, or SIR (it also stands for “Stories + Ideas + Relationships”). The theme Carlos chose for his most recent European event was “Transformational Leadership and Its Influence on Corporate Citizenship.” In retrospect, he says such a theme was spot-on because his influential guests “are truly in the soup of transformational leadership and corporate citizenship.”
He promoted the event as intended to create personal disclosure, flowing dialogue and voluntary commitment. When the breakthrough moments he was hoping for were slow in arriving, he fell back on his instincts and turned to key elements of the dolphin strategy.
“I went into the Change Wave and the Old Brain versus New Brain struggle (Shark, Carp, Dolphin). To my surprise and satisfaction—and I trust yours—that completely changed the tone of the meeting,” Carlos wrote us after his return to the U.S.
Carlos Salum and Gabriela Sabatini
Carlos says the Zurich International Sircle will be an annual event. He’s also planning to expand it to the Balkans and hopefully other cities in the U.S., Europe, Latin American and, circumstances permitting, Asia and the Middle East.
Our heartiest congratulations to Carlos on his Swiss success. That wasn’t an easy crowd to educate and entertain, but if anybody could do it, it would be the gentle-spoken, agile-minded expatriate from Argentina who helped turned Gabriela Sabatini’s career around in the early 1990s (see their photo above). That was our dear friend, Carlos, at another time and in another career: professional tennis coach to top-level competitors. He’s still coaching top-level competitors. And in Zurich, it was “game, set, match” to Carlos . . . once again.
Dateline: Kuala Lumpur
Our newest Brain Technologies Associate—Lim Si Pin of Selangor, Malaysia—joins us just as a five-year engagement as a councilor for the City Hall of Kuala Lumpur is ending. Si Pin describes the job he is leaving as a non-political public administration post where he was able to combine his interest in public policy and social transformation with “improving the well-being of the Malaysian capital.”
That’s not to say he doesn’t know his way around Malaysian politics. He ran for a seat in the Malaysian parliament in 2008 though he was unsuccessful. 
He then headed the youth wing of the Gerakan party for three years. “Even though I lost in my bid to become a Member of Parliament, the bright side that came out of my campaign trail was that I was being thrown into the deep blue sea and had a crash course in public-speaking . . . an experience which I still cherish today,” he wrote to me.
His interest in the dolphin strategy and the Brain Technologies thinking skills tools is longstanding. He explains, “In 1988, by happenstance, I bought a copy of Strategy of the Dolphin while in the U.K. for university training. I have read that entire book more than five times and continuously refer to it for inspiration.”
In the mid-1990s, he attended a two-day seminar in the dolphin strategy in Kuala Lumpur offered by one of BTC’s earliest associates, David Rogers. David had moved to Malaysia to marry the hospital nurse who had cared for him in Taiwan during a serious illness.
“David was a ‘tall poppy,’ as the Australians would have called him,” Si Pin recalls. “He had a brilliant mind and his worldview was unique. I guess it’s all because he lived the dolphin strategy principles in life and in work. It’s sad that he suffered ill-health towards the later part of his life.”
(Si Pin isn’t sure what happened to David, and neither am I. The last e-mails I had from him were in mid-2004. He was living in Dayton, Ohio, and informed me that a few months earlier he had become the 1052nd person to receive a heart transplant at Ohio’s renowned Cleveland Clinic. Neither the Internet nor the clinic has proved helpful in tracing what happened to David. My assumption is that, sadly, the transplant was a failure and the severe heart attack he had in Malaysia in 1998 finally claimed him.)
Si Pin is using an existing corporation, Korinian Sdn Bhd., as the base for his new training and consulting consultancy. He writes:
“I intend to use the BTC materials to steer clients towards long-term sustainable profitability/survival. In view of the massive competition that we are facing in South East Asian countries, especially with the advent of cheap labour and economies of scale from emerging markets like China, Vietnam and Indonesia, we are poised to face a huge uphill battle against these giants who have a combined population of 2.5 billion, that is, if we don’t change the way we work and perceive the world.
“I strongly believe the SMEs (small and medium enterprises) in my country still stand a chance if we continue to innovate and add value based on our knowledge incubation and language advantage (most Chinese, Vietnamese and Indonesians don’t speak English). We still have a bright future ahead if we take hold of the opportunity NOW . . . to think beyond the limitations . . . and think powerfully.”
Our new colleague is exceptionally well-equipped to be an effective leadership consultant to business. He received a double honors degree in law and economics from the University of Wales (Aberystwyth) in 1992 and a masters degree in banking and finance from the University of Wales (Cardiff) in 1993. He sat for the Malaysian bar exams in 1994.
For the next eleven years, he worked in investment banking. His experiences ranged from designing and launching IPOs to heading portfolio management and micro crediting lending for a large Malaysian insurance company to serving as a corporate finance manager. In 2005, he began three-year stints on the boards of an ecological biomass recycling company and a software technology company.
He is a certified practitioner in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), has been certified by the American National Guild of Hypnotists as a hypnotherapist and has certificates from an impressive number of seminars based on the theories and techniques of such cutting-edge business “thought luminaries” as Buckminster Fuller, W. Edwards Deming and Robert Axelrod.
As his photo (above) seems to suggest, he’s not your typical Malaysian businessperson, much less one trained as a lawyer and banker.
It’s a great joy to welcome Si Pin to our growing stable of associates in the Southeast Asian countries. You can reach him at i@limsipin.com.
Dateline: Montreal
Not since the early 1990s and the original release of Strategy of the Dolphin in French have dolphin waters in Montreal been stirring with roll-out activity as much as they have been the past few weeks.
The triggering event was the release in August of the French language version of LEAP! How to Think Like a Dolphin & Do the Next Right, Smart Thing Come Hell or High Waters. That was quickly followed in September by the publication of the third French language edition of Strategy of the Dolphin. Both books were published by Éditions de l’Homme.
Our longstanding Francophone licensees, Michèle Carrier and Charles Boulos, have adroitly seized on the book launchings to promote both L’élan du dauphin and La stratégie du dauphin and several upcoming seminars staged by their company, Groupe Metafor International.
First, Michèle was interviewed by Canal Argent TVA’s François Gagnon on his Questions d’argent (“Money Matters”) cable television show. Then in late September, L’élan du dauphin was featured by columnist Martine Letarte in La Presse, a newspaper distributed through French Canada. The (translated) headline was “Are You a Dolphin?”
Madam Carrier was her usual skilled interpreter of the dolphin philosophy. At one point, a translation of the piece finds her saying:
“The dolphin is not superman. We live in an uncertain and unpredictable World. We must constantly remember to take the World as it is while preparing for the next leap. . . . A dolphin has a pragmatic and functional mind. He quickly adopts new values and new ways of seeing the world to better cope with the complexity of reality and the speed with which events unfold.”
What’s not to like about crisp, evocative descriptions like that?!
Michèle and Charles have two “La Stratégie du Dauphin !” seminars scheduled in November, one in Montreal (6-8) and one in Paris (27-29). They are also planning two new workshop formats. The first is a one-day seminar concept focusing on the four Brain Technologies assessment instruments (The BrainMap, etc.) one at a time and a two-day “dolphinthinkers” design for persons who have taken at least two of the instrument-theme workshops. Details will be forthcoming shortly.
Here’s to our committed Francophone pod of dolphin strategists and its new stirrings!
Dateline: Gainesville, Florida
Strategy of the Dolphin, the new-paradigm-oriented work that Paul Kordis and I wrote a quarter-century ago, is now available as an eBook. Putting the work on line marked the finale to our summer-long (plus a few weeks) project at BTC to publish as eBooks all three of our works exploring the late Clare W. Graves’ extraordinary “biopsychosocial” model of human sense-making systems. (LEAP! can be ordered as an eBook here, and The Mother of All Minds here.)
Later this week, we will be posting the email promo you see below to our clients and friends. It pictures 12 of the 13 book covers (the Turkish cover is not pictured) for the various editions of Strategy of the Dolphin that have appeared through the years.
As I noted in the blog post that preceded this one, until this undertaking, I’d not read the entire book since it was published—or actually done much reading in it at all. Mostly, I’ve been creating other things. But sorting out the mangled OCR (optional character recognition) files and formatting the 286 pages of text and assorted material for the eBook converter required reading the work anew, word for word. Closely.
Some realizations:
—While the contents of the world around us have often changed drastically since 1988 and 1989, when we were creating the book, the context is remarkably the same. The pace is change, change, change—and most of our suggestions for dealing with it continue as actionable as ever. In reading it again, I saw anew why Strategy of the Dolphin literally helped to invent the life-coaching profession. And why stealing our metaphors and models became something of a cottage industry worldwide. (Sometimes, we were credited; frequently we were not.) The book is about getting real in every day existence and about common realities in the human condition. And that need and those realities are still pretty much the same everywhere.
—In one way or another, readers by the dozens have told us for years that “this book changed my life.” As I gathered the endorsements placed at the front of the eBook version, I realized just how profound are the feelings of readers from all points of the globe about the book on this point.
—There is something uncanny about effect that the aquatic metaphors, the model of the wave, the dilemma-resolution instructions and other features of the book can have on a reader’s deeper sensibilities. One young (teenaged, I would guess) reviewer for one of the online book review services said it this way: “It’s like it [the book content] went right into my subconscious.” However that works, it seems to leave the reader with a sense of new personal empowerment sometimes not available from many how-to-books on personal growth and preparing for change.
