Eric Chgd>Arian Ward:  

Now pic: New Year's Eve, 2017 Hanging with my constant companion, 17 yo blue & gold macaw, Ra (like the Egyptian sun god) Sunset on Blind Pass Beach, Manasota Key, Florida (20 min. from our house in Venice, FL) Then pic: My first Christmas - 1950, South Minneapolis, MN - age 9 mo. My life story would fill a Lord of the Rings size trilogy so I won't burden you with all those livid details. The short version for those who want a glimpse of that past: >> Married 5 times, lived with 4 other women, had a number of other intimate relationships, but single now >> Have 4 children (3 adopted) and 8 grandchildren > > Lived in 43 different places in my life (37 since high school) -- in 11 U.S. states & 2 Canadian provinces. >> Traveled extensively for work and pleasure - to 50 U.S. states & territories, 5 Canadian provinces, and 17 other countries. I am happiest when living and traveling as a free spirit and nomad! >> Had more than 30 jobs/careers in many different fields but now retired and thinking about yet another part-time career in addition to my ongoing profession of cultural anthropologist specializing in world spiritual traditions, organizational culture, community building, large-scale transformation, animal behavior and communication (applying my skills studying human groups to animals), and interspecies and human:animal relationships. >> During 1 of these careers, I had my Andy Warhol-type "15 minutes of fame" in the '90s when I was featured worldwide in hundreds of books, articles, conferences, and websites, including a Fortune magazine cover story. I was named as one of :"the top 10 management gurus in the world" by a South Korean business journal. > When Proctor & Gamble was looking for an outsider perspective to shake up their internal "group think" at an important "reinvent the company" senior management offsite, they were referred to me by several executives and experts as "the most out-of-the=box thinker in American business. today" > Even foreign governments and the U.S. Federal government sought my advice. I formed knowledge sharing partnerships between my company, HSC, and NASA, DoD, NSA, CIA, and GSA, as well as many U.S. and foreign companies and research organizations.. > HSC has all of the awards we were given for the work I led, except for one rather unusual gift I was personally given in a formal ceremony in gratitude for my guidance - a black mug etched in gold with the name and insignia of the NSA lol. > My partner and I received an honorary, up-close, high security tour of the most advanced military aircraft at the time - the B2 Stealth bomber and its production facility in the desert outside LA. > I was invited to Hong Kong and China to participate in a summit on "The Future of Asia". While there, I met with the new Governor of the recently returned Hong Kong special administrative region of the PRC; counseled, and dialogued and socialized with the richest family in Hong Kong, whose patriarch was also in the PRC government's top leadership; and was interviewed for the Guangzhou evening news. I still laugh about how I couldn't understand it when I watched it on TV that evening because it was in Cantonese except for my words of course, but they dubbed a Cantonese translation over it so I couldn't even hear myself lol > I was invited to speak in Israel twice. At one of those I presented with the head of the Mossad, Israel's best-in-the-world intelligence agency. For some reason, I kept running into and collaborating with intelligence agencies around the world, despite my non-violent, pro-peace views. Guess it was part of my purpose to "soften" them a bit, with more people and knowledge-centric organizational management innovations. > collaborated with South Korean government, business media, large corporations, and academic researchers to develop a new economic model for the country based on its intellectual capital vs. its manufacturing capabilities It is fascinating personal experiences like these that I value and fondly remember much more than all the media hype around my work.. That's what my life story really is - thousands of these amazing personal experiences that deepened my knowledge of the world and its inhabitants and shaped me into who I am today. My name still returns 900-1700 Google hits, many years later (The number of Google returns varies widely each time I try it, for some unknown reason. They've changed over time though to be more than half foreign language translations. In the '90s, when the internet was in its "adolescent" stage, only about 20% of the web references weren't in English. >> I got fed up with the ego...Expand for more