Keynote Speakers

Encore: Reinventing Education and Work for the Second Half of Life

Speaker: Marc Freedman, CEO of Civic Ventures

Many Americans—particularly Baby Boomers—emerge from midlife seeking opportunities to channel their skills and experience into work with a larger social significance. Buoyed by gains in longevity and health, this new generation of 50- and 60-somethings is shaping a new stage of life and work between midlife and old age. Marc Freedman discusses baby boomers’ changing attitudes toward personal contribution and work in the post-midlife years, focusing on a new role for higher education in the coming demographic transformation. It’s all detailed in his new book, Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life.

Marc Freedman is the founder and CEO of Civic Ventures. He’s also co-founder of Experience Corps, the nation’s largest nonprofit national service program engaging Americans over 55, and The Purpose Prize, the nation’s first prize for, and biggest investment in, social innovators over 60. Freedman is one of the nation’s leading thinkers and writers on the opportunities presented by the aging of America.

Achieving Customer/Learner Alignment

Speaker: Dick Lee, Founder & Principal, High-Yield Methods

By nature, continuing education organizations take a softer stance toward customers than for-profit business. CE units care more and see themselves as service organizations more than selling organizations. But that’s not enough to achieve customer alignment.

While CE units readily accomplish the cultural, attitudinal and behavioral aspects of customer alignment that business struggles to achieve, the reverse is true for attaining the internal alignment necessary to meet customer needs and expectations. Without the operational discipline imposed by thirst for profits, CE units struggle to overcome misalignment caused by functional and program silos.

Dick will outline how CE groups must take a structured and highly participative approach to synchronizing work across functional and program lines. Individual priorities must yield to the goal of providing the optimal customer experience.

Dick Lee is founder and principal of St. Paul, Minnesota-based High-Yield Methods. HYM helps clients align strategies with customers, process with strategy, and technology with process. Dick is the author of several books and numerous journal articles on CRM and customer-alignment. He is a graduate of Reed College and holds an MBA from Suffolk University.

For more information on the seminar
Contact Natalia Kats, UCEA Director of Conferences, at nkats@upcea.edu or 202.659.3130.