Rocky Ozaki
Speaker Bio
Rocky Ozaki is one of North America’s leading business culture transformation experts on the future of work. Rocky is the Founder & CEO of the NoW of Work – a business transformation firm whose primary focus is helping leaders build future-proofed, resilient teams that are anchored on cultures of innovation and agility. He couples a decade of senior leadership roles in large organizations, with 10 years in start-up tech to form what he believes is the culture and operational DNA of all modern companies.
Previously, Rocky held the role of Vice-President and Head of Corporate Innovation for the BC Tech Association and just recently launched Pondr – innovation software that guides and measures organizations’ innovation journeys as a strategic priority. Pondr will capture ideas, then guide the innovation journey, so teams develop the habit of ideating, validating, testing, learning, and measuring the return on their innovation investments. Through his experience as an entrepreneur and business leader, Rocky has always been at the forefront of digital transformation.
As a successful entrepreneur, Rocky Ozaki shares the basics around corporate innovation, defining key terms & frameworks used in the innovation world, and provides tactics to begin, or re-energize your organization’s transformation journey. The global pandemic may have forced organizations to challenge all their assumptions, but it’s also rapidly given birth to new products and services. Innovation is now a table stakes of every modern organization.
Rocky Ozaki first heard the term, “the Future of Work” in 2010. Rocky Ozaki watched tech companies, mostly in Silicon Valley, co-designing a new paradigm of work (and life) that compelled him to leave the corporate world and join the startup tech scene in Vancouver, Canada. At first, Rocky Ozaki called BS on ping pong tables, Friday @ 4, “holacracy”, unlimited vacation, flip-flop-wearing CEOs, and the hyper-personalization and democratization of anything startups could solve with code.
Within three months, he was converted. Not only did he believe in this “Future of Work”, but it also became clear to him that every company would one day operate as a technology company. By 2013, Rocky Ozaki estimated that 99% of companies were still stuck in an outdated industrial age mindset and were facing inevitable disruption.
Once Rocky Ozaki equipped himself with years of startup & scale-up tech experience and entrenched himself in the innovation scenes across North America, He founded the “NoW of Work” with Eric Termuende, which had a clear focus to prepare organizations for the future through generational and accelerated change. The problem to solve was clear – people and companies were not ready for an exponential world.
The information/digital age has exploded beyond most people’s wildest imagination. A team, equipped with the culture and operational knowledge of both (necessarily bureaucratic) large corporations and scrappy (necessarily innovative and agile) startup tech, could bridge the gap and help organizations thrive in a rapidly changing world. Rocky Ozaki delivers keynotes, training and consulting services with a hyper-focus on creating naturally innovative and agile teams capable of thriving in exponential times through great resignation.
Throughout the years, Rocky became an expert at identifying trends in the market and for the internal operations within a company. Along with his success came a large understanding of the future of work and how organizations needed to focus more on their people. Rocky Ozaki’s ‘disrupthr’ talks bring leaders and hr organizations foundational strategies to prepare for the future to create strong workforces that appeal to the 21st Century labour market. Rocky specializes in helping executives build futureproofed resilient organizations that attract the right employees and retain top talent in a competitive environment.
Rocky Ozaki delivers keynotes and other presentations with a hyper-focus on creating naturally innovative and agile teams capable of thriving in our exponential times. He is passionate about helping executives build future-proofed resilient organizations that attract the right employees to bring organizations to new foundations of thinking and operating for business success.
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