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MIHA POGAČNIK

At the vanguard of innovation, classical concert violinist, world-renowned for inspiring organizational transformation and leadership

“Music, of all the arts, reaches deepest into our experience and our solar plexus of learning and inner transformation…”

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TOPICS

Leadership	Organizational and Human Development
Inspiration	Art and Business
Creativity	Team Building
Change	Diversity

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Keynote Speaker and Cultural Entrepreneur

• Offers an original response to today's quest of the business world for innovation and leadership.
• Hailed by The Guardian, London, as an artist who is making “hard-nosed executives turn to the world of creative talent in a pragmatic effort to improve efficiency.”
• Renowned for setting the world standard in “Art and Business”.

After completing a Fulbright Scholarship, Miha’s intellectual curiosity, joie de vivre and vision to position the arts as a driver for social change, led him to step outside the parameters of a classical concert violinist. Why? Because “creativity and innovation are primary business skills central to growth and sustainability. If you add passion, courage, performance and imagination, you have the qualities that artists live by. By establishing a new relationship between the arts and business, one in which I bring the profound musical process to the corporate floor and use the arts as an organizational development tool, bold visions can be considered and realized. The linear and rational must fuse with inspiration, beauty and passion for change to be implemented.”

Miha taps the largely unexplored potential of art as a significant force for productivity, creativity, and organizational renewal by:

• inspiring business leaders around the world to “think out of the box”;
• helping teams intensify the spirit of innovation — leading them towards new ways of listening to themselves and to others by tapping the pathways of their intellect and emotion;
• using music to enhance understanding of the most pressing demands of business, ranging from the search for excellence and quality, to problem-solving and leadership.

Cultural Ambassador of the Republic of Slovenia, 1992 – Present

In a unique role of a roving diplomat, through his presentations and intercultural festivals around the world, generates good will and a new focus on the role of the arts.

President and Founder, Institute for Development of Intercultural Relations through the Arts (IDRIART), 1983 - Present

“Art can't just happen. It must make things happen.”

In addition to working with the corporate sector, through IDRIART, Miha has an ambitious portfolio of exploratory projects focused on development and change, based on the tenet that the arts don’t just offer beauty, meaning and passion, and a tool for organizational development, but can also drive social change.

Under the umbrella of IDRIART, Miha has:

• Directed an innovative interdisciplinary international event, the “Annual Business and Art Conference”, in Castle Borl-Ankenstein, Slovenia, the ancestral home of the Wagnerian hero Parsifal's grandfather, since 1998.
• Launched 180 intercultural festivals with invited audiences of artists, academicians and business leaders, travelling to crisis areas of the world. Says Miha: "We exchanged views on democracy, art, ecology, alternative medicine -- anything that might play a role in reinventing our societies." There have been summer festivals in the cathedral of Chartres and Cultural Caravans well before the Iron Curtain crumbled -- including one to Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1986, and others from Mongolia to Amazonia, Tibet to South Africa, and much of Europe and the Middle East, bringing together, however briefly, people from different cultures. Among IDRIART's biggest ventures has been a 1992 caravan from Berlin to Ulan Bator, across Eastern Europe and then Russia, Siberia and Mongolia along the Trans-Siberian railway.
• Subsequent to the expansion of the European Union, established the Commission for European Identity, 2004. “While the economy goes globalized, culture and art must go individualized. Europe can be a showcase for this, to enable the bridge between the two sectors to become fruitful, and to play an essential role for the rest of the world.”

ILLUSTRATIVE CLIENTS

Corporate sector: Scores of leading companies across industries, such as Ericsson, Shell, IBM, Hewlett and Packard, Saatchi & Saatchi, Pfizer Global Pharmaceuticals, Whirlpool, Skandia Insurance, ABN Amro Bank, Fortis, Nike, Body Shop, World ESOMAR Research, Cushman Wakefield, Healey and Baker, Deutsche Telekom, Porsche, World Economic Forum/Davos and others.

Other sectors: World Business Academy, United Nations agencies, business schools, research institutions, professional associations.

LANGUAGE FLUENCY	WORKING KNOWLEDGE
English, German, Slovene	Spanish