George Andriopoulos

George closed the show at Speakers Who Dare 2019 with his powerful “(Not Just) For Profit” talk which took the audience on an 8 minute journey as he claimed responsibility for the part he played in corporate greed and introduced a solution that could revolutionize corporate good.

Why is it that if you put a problem in front of my kids and the same problem in front of me, my kids will do a better job solving it? That’s because I went and did what a kid considers the worst thing imaginable…I grew up. We relate adulting to work and responsibilities, but the truth about adulting is that we develop reasoning that controls our thought process as we grow older. There is no box surrounding our ideas, there’s only reasoning telling us why our ideas won’t work. Kids, on the other hand, don’t have the baggage weighing down their ideas that we adults tend to carry. So how do we find the middle ground? How do we maintain our creativity while still retaining some semblance of adult responsibility? Better yet, how do we cultivate the creativity in our children so that they don’t go down the same predictable road that we did?

A 5th grader and a mechanical engineer walk into a bar (stop me if you’ve heard this one). They are tasked with building an efficient scale within 3 days, that can weigh items up to 1 pound using any materials they desire. They present their finished projects three days later. The engineer developed a digital scale with an internal processor that links to a mobile app and can measure down to the nearest ounce. The cost to build his project was nearly $400 and it took him the entire three days. The student built a balance scale using balsa wood, rubber bands, paper plates and a check weight set, which he borrowed from his science teacher. It measures to the nearest tenth of a gram and cost him $3.50 to build. He also coded a simple website in his spare time with a weight conversion chart, instructional videos on how to build this scale, and earned $23.75 in ad revenue from those YouTube videos.
So how do we cultivate and harness the creativity of our students?

George guest lectured for the Occupational Therapy department of Hofstra University on the topic of Needs Assessment. George frequently guest lectures for classes in both universities and public schools. This particular lecture tied his medical background and management consulting skillsets to provide the OT students with insights on the process of Needs Assessment.