Professional Development Opportunity!

Our friends at Wily—a design agency based at Camp North End in Charlotte—are running a Design Sprint Bootcamp on September 11-12Jake Knapp—creator of Design Sprints and author of NYT bestseller “Sprint“—will lead Day 1 of the two day training. Jake perfected Design Sprints while at GV/Google Ventures helping companies like AirBnB, Slack, Nest, Flatiron Health, and 23andMe solve big challenges. Jeff Grant will be leading Day 2 to cover prototyping and testing. Jeff innovates the retail security experience as head of product and innovation at InVue, has created satellite hardware for NASA, and was former co-founder and director of IDEO’s toy business line where he helped invent new products. Jake and Jeff will walk you step-by-step through the training and will be spilling all of their design and prototyping secrets.

Details are at wilysprints.com and a nice Harvard Business Review article about sprints can be found here.


Mark Weber, Croixstone’s Managing Partner, Speaks with WBTV

On August 16th, the family of Aretha Franklin confirmed that the 18-time Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter died of pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer.  Croixstone leaders Mark and Patti Weber each lost a parent to pancreatic cancer, and both actively volunteer with the Charlotte Affiliate of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network to increase awareness of the disease and raise money for research.  Maureen O’Boyle of WBTV (Charlotte’s CBS Affiliate) recently interviewed Mark about his passion to rewrite the future of pancreatic cancer.  Read the interview here.


Consulting Industry Platforms

A great resource for consultants is the “Consultancy.org” network.  This global network of consulting industry platforms (including North America, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and Australia) provides the latest in consulting news, market information, and more.  Consultancy.org launched its US platform earlier this year.  View it here.


Charlotte Region By the Numbers

In June, the Charlotte Regional Partnership announced that it was launching a new quarterly economic activity report to capture an overarching look at capital investment, job growth and other important business data across the 16-county Charlotte region.  We read the published report and learned that the vast majority of companies that located or expanded in the region are manufacturers.  The report also reinforced that financial services is not the largest employer among the region’s industry sectors (it is healthcare by a large margin).  Read the new report here.


Blockchain in Action

Because Croixstone agrees with experts that blockchain has the potential to “change the world” (think of it as the “Internet of Value or of Money”), we believe in the value of repeatedly spotlighting this technology. The Enterprisers Project (a community of CIOs who discuss the future of business and IT) recently shared 5 real world examples across 5 industries where blockchain projects are showing tangible progress.  Learn more here.