January Positive Business Meetup

Please join us for the January 2019 Positive Business Meetup. At this meetup, Carl Erickson, the Founder of Atomic Object, will be presenting about “The power of words: crafting your organization’s existential statements”.

About the Presentation:
Who doesn’t cringe when they hear that an organization they’re a part of has hired a consultant to lead them through an exercise to draft their vision/mission statement? What comes out of most of these exercises is shelved soon after the ink dries on the document. I think words are powerful and these existential statements have incredible utility. In this talk I share my 18 year journey wrestling with this challenge, what I’ve learned, mistakes I’ve made, the framework we’ve settled on, and the value we get on a daily basis from this work.

About Carl:
I founded Atomic Object in the summer of 2001. As Atomic grew, I gradually moved from programming on a daily basis to running the operations of our Grand Rapids office. In January 2014 I took the title of CEO and started working on things with longer time horizons, like speculative development investments, governance, ownership, marketing, and growing our Ann Arbor office. In May of 2019 I moved into a chairman role and appointed co-CEOs.

Atomic Object is a software development consultancy. We design and build custom web, mobile, and embedded software products. Atomic Object serves clients across the US and around the world, in diverse markets including automotive, healthcare, financial services, education, distribution, and entertainment.

I’m an active angel investor, a member and director of Grand Angels, and managing director for Tappan Hill Ventures. I’ve served on the boards of several tech startups, including Blue Medora, Local Orbit, Varsity News Network, and Mock Draft Central.

I maintain my own blog, Great Not Big, where I share ideas about building and running a purpose-driven, people-first, profitable company.

Agenda:
6:00 - register and network
6:15 - welcome and introduction
6:20 - presentation and discussion
7:40 - closing comments and networking

Food and beverages will be provided.