CARLOS MICELI

My life has been marked by sticking to a few key mindsets:

• Focus on systems principles and fundamentals. 
• Take intelligent risks and pursue unconventional, untapped opportunities.
• Understand people’s motivation and behavior in order to connect ideas and points of view.
• Learn by doing and teaching others.
• Follow the guidance of mentors and proven experts.
• Ask the right questions to see problems and potential solutions clearly.

As someone that is "comfortable amid chaos," I thrive in situations with lots of potential, but little clarity on what needs to be done. Having started many profitable businesses (and helping many others start their own) and being focused in the new trends of career growth, I can quickly diagnose people's plans and discover breakthrough opportunities for their careers or businesses, build the right systems to see sustained growth early, and communicate their value effectively in order to get what they want from the world.

I work on understanding and providing value around the following areas:

The way our careers grow or die changed forever. A well-curated resumé and a college degree with good grades is no longer enough to guarantee a long-term successful career. Entrepreneurial spirit is now a must if we want to advance with the times. If you feel stuck or threatened by professional uncertainty, you have an outdated mindset. To improve their professional situation, I guide people in:

• Knowing how to learn new skills faster, and retain and use information better.
• Creating and updating their credentials to showcase their value and experience.
• Growing their networks and creating value consistently for the people in them.
• Increasing or decreasing inputs in the different areas of their life, depending on the goal ahead.
• Remembering their personal values to know what to work on, and what to avoid.

In the networked age, most companies have difficulty 1) detecting challenges and opportunities in their business or industry, 2) communicating them quickly and effectively to the world, 3) identifying and recruiting the most suitable talent, and 4) developing said talent to maximize the ROI of the partnership. As Reid Hoffman says, a business that can't develop loyal, long-term relationships with great people is unable to invest in the future, which means it's already in the process of dying. Starting from how people behave, I help companies:

• Diagnose their culture and uncover harmful values and blind spots.
• Shift their focus from what's urgent to developing the necessary discipline for long term success.
• Have dialogues with potential hires and employees that are grounded in empathy, honesty and vulnerability, in order to define clear steps towards a positive future for both parties.
• Humanize the work relationship to maximize results, satisfaction, and long-term cooperation.
• Imagine strategies to bring, cultivate, and reward entrepreneurial thinking in the organization, the most valuable mindset in a fast-paced changing world.

As Jack Welch says, business isn't rocket science. It's one of simplest things in the world... but that doesn't make it easy. I believe that anyone can excel in the art of business, as long as they approach it with humility, dedication to reality, and discipline to test and improve every day. I diagnose business ideas and strategies by:

• Analyzing the foundations of the business to check if the fundamentals are in place (this is where most people fail).

• Asking the right questions to see the market scenario and challenges objectively.

• Detecting the business model's assumptions, finding gaps with the market reality, and updating the model.

• Identifying the business' systems, suggesting improvement iterations, and installing a "permanent beta" system thinking mindset.

The things we want in life are found in other people: jobs, customers, partners, friendships, and more. Knowing where and how to find the right people, and how to effectively communicate how we can improve their lives, is one of the most important skills in a globalized and immediate world. For most people, sadly, it's also one of the least developed. I help people make their message successful by:

• Understanding human motivation and behavior, so their message rides the waves of human attention instead of trying to fight it.
• Framing and organizing their message by leaving out the clutter in order to maximize impact.
• Knowing where to find the people they need to connect with, how to engage with them, and perceive the common ground between them.
• Adapting their message to the medium, audience, and desired objective at each step.

Procrastination is at an all-time high. It's hard to read all the information that comes our way, and harder to distinguish the value from the noise. People start new healthy or productive habits every day, only to abandon them a month later. They announce what they want to accomplish in their lives, but time goes by and they never see those goals come to fruition. I help people develop their discipline, clarity and productivity by:

• Building a supportive context for the desired habit, and leveraging friction to maintain it.
• Embracing their biology's limitations to maximize energy usage and recovery, and avoiding common mental traps.
• Sharing techniques to minimize the need of willpower to perform well consistently.
• Uncovering philosophies, values, and beliefs, to ensure that motivation and intentions are aligned.

Follow your passion. Listen to your calling. Do what makes you happy. These messages have become vox populi, particularly among the younger generations. The idea that there is a force that, if we are brave enough to submit to it, will pull/push us towards a future where our career-related pains will disappear, is very tempting. This trend is a symptom of a modern struggle we all face repeatedly: feeling something in our lives is "wrong", but not knowing how or where to start to change it. I've talked to hundreds of people in this situation, and I help them decipher their impulses and anxieties by:

• Asking the right (and usually hard) questions to ensure a dialogue grounded in reality.
• Reading "between the lines" of their words and actions, and pointing at inconsistencies or more useful possible perspectives.
• Simulating possible scenarios to help grasp what the future can look like, and how to get there.
• Detecting justifications that shield fears, prejudices, information and logic gaps, and blind spots.

"Carlos is an outstanding speaker, with an impressive ability to synthesize his ideas on simple and engaging talks." - Tomás Abadi, Stanford University event attendee (USA)

"Carlos' talks are always supported by research and hard earned experience. Full of practical tips and frameworks that are easy to understand and apply, Carlos has helped me shift the way I think about sales and growing my career." - Florencia Di Sarli, Consultant and UC Irvine event attendee (USA)

"Carlos led a workshop that not only personally transformed my life, but also other students in my community. He led by example and really engaged our entire audience on what mattered to them. If you get the chance, I highly recommend listening to Carlos speak." - Aidan Gold, Spark Boulder event organizer (USA)

"I love meeting people like Carlos, that know so well what they want to do and why they want to do it... and share it with others! A relentless entrepreneur, simple and focused, with the charm and attitude required to inspire others." - Alba Romero, Director of Experiences at Diverza (Mexico)

"Besides his charisma in front of an audience, Carlos' life experiences and ability to communicate what he knows helped everyone look forward to new challenges." - Juliana Giraldo, Entrepreneurship Coordinator at Escuela de Ingeniería de Antioquia (Colombia)

"When listening to Carlos, you feel like you're having one of the most important conversations of your life, because he can express with ease the most powerful convictions." Jhon A. Hincapie, Marketing Director at Cooperativa para el Empleo y Desarrollo Social (Colombia)

"We invited Carlos and other entrepreneurs to speak about HR and recruiting trends in startups for our entrepreneurship class at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Our students were a mix of small business and startup owners, average age 40, and they voted the class as the best one in the semester. Carlos kicked-off the class with a very useful framework for the rest of the session to continue successfully. I recommend Carlos both because of his speaking skills and his understanding of professional networks and relationships." - Michel Mosse, Operations Manager at UBER and UTDT Factory organizer (Argentina)