Marcus Crow

Marcus Crow's Biography

Marcus Crow is a professional speaker, master of ceremonies, facilitator, and skills trainer with over 10,000 hours experience providing thought provoking content, impact and energy for hundreds of clients for over a decade. For the last 13 years, he co-founded, built and grew Oxygen Learning, Australia's leading experiential learning and development practice. In 2011 the business was sold to ASX-listed STW Group, the marketing and communications services conglomerate founded by John Singleton. In that time Marcus has delivered thousands of keynotes and workshops to thousands of leaders from ASX200 and other market leading top-tier businesses and government agencies. Now he is the Founder of 10,000 Hours, a start-up business focused on adult learning via keynote presentations.

He has a background as an auditor with Price Waterhouse, a sales and marketing professional with Colgate-Palmolive and Mitsubishi Electric, and long time gopher in his father's accountancy practice and computer time-share data-processing business. This means Marcus understands the sales and marketing front end of business as much as the operational middle and back end of service delivery, compliance and control. He also gets what life is like for small business owners, people driving change, and entrepreneurs, having grown up around it and being one himself.

He holds a Bachelor of Business and is a long time member of Australian Mensa. He has a keen eye for applying potent ideas into the pragmatic context for the audience with whom he shares the room. He distils all his messages into simple behaviours the audience can learn, practice, take away and use immediately.

His humourous approach, passion for wide and deep research, and refined acuity for reading a room of adults and knowing what is needed next ensures the session arrives at your outcome. Regular clients include Macquarie Bank, Westpac, Telstra, Origin Energy, Nestle, Cisco, Leighton.

Speaking Topics Include

Get your GRIT together

Commitment is doing what you said you would do, even after the feeling you said it with has left you. And therein lies the human challenge of getting to our goals. We can set them. We can set SMART ones. And we can feel fantastic about defining the goal and writing it down.

Ultimately though, the writing of the goal is the easy part, the getting of the goal is the hard part. It takes grit. This one-hour session explores the emotional experience of goal achievement. It highlights the three widely used strategies for maintaining activity in the direction of our goal even when we don't feel like it or conditions are making it hard to do. It demonstrates how to be gritty. Stay the course. Maintain the momentum.

Your audience will relate to the all-too-common narrative of hundreds of other goal achievers, their highs, their lows, their frustrations, their failures. These are not the stories from Olympians, or mountain climbers; these are the stories of everyday individuals trying to get things done. Just like your audience. They will walk away from the session understanding:

This one-hour session combines robust research, humourous insight, pragmatic use-them-straight-away skills, and plenty of interaction to keep your audience engaged.

Vuja De - The emotional experience of innovation - Vu Ja De - Innovation for the rest of us. This keynote is about a suite of simple behaviours to make innovation happen anywhere we are in search of new ideas or better ways of working. Vu Ja De is the opposite of Deja Vu and it describes the notion of being somewhere we have been many times before yet are seeing for the first time. In this session we recognise the tension between improving what a business already has and does and at the same time exploring for new territories ripe with opportunity.

This session is for people being asked to be innovative. Or maybe be creative, think outside the box, find a better way, brainstorm! All these managerial calls to arms require a proven method. Enter: Vuja De innovation. Not to intimidate your audience with austere images of sleek architecture, but to stand alongside them as they marinate in the mess of exploration innovation. This session is for everybody who does not see themselves as creative, artistic, or an ideas-type.

Participants will learn the stages of exploratory innovation giving them a fluency to able to uncover user needs, distilling potent insights that feed into an idea generation process, and then learning the shape of final solutions in a low-risk proven way. Importantly they will also learn the emotional journey they are likely to encounter and strategies to deal with that too.

If the six-sigma soldiers have nowhere left to explore, and the final shreds of cost have been ripped from the operation, yet we still must find growth.... Then this session is perfect for you. It complements the efforts of six-sigma initiatives and gives audiences versed in LEAN, DMAIC and other related exploit innovation methods an additional suite of weapons with which to further uncover areas in the business they should investigate.

Innovation is no longer a theory. It is a contact sport. Sleeves are rolled up, hands are scratched, knees are scraped, emotions even bruised, but knuckles never wrapped. This session shows how it is done and how it is led in your organisation.

Finding the eye in team

This session is for people who need to work with other people. It suits a context of recently completed re-structure, new colleagues, new leadership, matrix structure, virtual teams.

Using uniquely combined ideas it takes the teamwork discussion beyond classic lenses like Myers-Briggs, DiSC and Belbin, this session gives participants a new, robust, and simple method for thinking about themselves and others. It teaches how to identify an individual's likely preferences, and further, it explores what to actually do with that insight. The participants will be on their feet actually using the methods and ideas in your meeting room.

For teams that must urgently get cohesive and work effectively around a project; for stakeholders across diverse areas of an organisation that collaborate, for significant CapEx initiatives hinged on a few people working well together, for people who work in sales, customer service, front line, or people leadership, Finding the eye in team has something for them to use immediately. The session will improve their eye for others, and help them keep a knowing eye on team proceedings and know how to elegantly move the team along.

It won't be a case of being told "here's a theory and next time you're out there have a think about giving it a try"; rather they will physically experience the idea in the room and so know how it works, how to use it and when to do it. Insightful, robust, and with a new twist on how individuals should work together, Finding the eye in team will give everybody a new trick or two in dealing with others.