Breaking Genius

Learn how you and your team can do in one day what a mob of McKinsies (et al) and million$ can’t get done in months.

Breaking Genius took 25 years of real-world consulting practice and 7 years of rigorous scientific and academic research to complete. It is teachable. It is learnable. It ensures repeatable moments of genius for anything you do.

John Krubski, co-author: “For more than 25 years, I have been soliciting clients with an offer: “Put your team in a room with me for one day and I will guarantee that, by the end of that day, they will get to a consensus, a vision, and an action plan. If I fail to deliver, you don’t pay (when was the last time you heard THAT from a consultant?). Either way, your team will learn something new about your business, change their minds about something they believed about the business, and have the most intellectual fun they have had since experiencing the best teacher that has ever stretched their thinking. I have never left any money on the table.”

Overpromise? Hype? You Decide.

Dr. Alexandra K. Krubski, PsyD

“I have applied the principles of Breaking Genius in grades 9-12 for the past decade, shared them with my colleagues across subject areas, worked to integrate them into my curriculum, or implemented them on the fly. I have carried these tools with me to meetings, workshops, and postgraduate classes, and each time I have met with the same success.

The simple elegance of Thinking Whole cannot be overstated. The processes are formulaic (in the best sense of that word), simple to remember, easy to implement, and each time they work to create a container for our thinking where great things happen.



Productive Meetings Every Time Guaranteed

My Promise To You In writing this book

It is my purpose and my hope to leave you with three actionable deliverables.

  1. Provide you with a code-breaking key that lets you get to the heart of any meeting— fast—without having to depend on what the meeting organizer does or fails to do.
  2. As a meeting attendee—help you build a platform for getting the most value out of any meeting you attend.
  3. And as a meeting organizer—to give you the tools to make your meetings more focused and, meaningful to the attendees. And ultimately more actionable and enjoyable for everyone. Give you the skills to master any amount of information under any circumstances with confidence with the certain knowledge that you will always be able to extract exactly what you need when you need it.

First of all, this book was written by one of the most impatient meeting-goers in the history of mankind. I am the most impatient guy in any meeting and I can’t stand it when people say “This is very complicated.” That kind of thinking automatically makes meetings infinitely less likely to be successful and more likely to be pointless, unproductive, even counter-productive in the end.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as too much information and even the most complicated issue can be whittled down to its fundamentals if you just use the right whittling device and know the best techniques for idea whittling. It’s starts with cracking the code and getting to the heart of the matter…any matter.

The purpose of this book is to help you make sense of meetings as an attendee or as the organizer responsible for ensuring that others makes sense of them.

 What follows is a roadmap for productive, actionable meeting results.



Cracking The America Code

John Krubski has been described as a “futurist with his feet on the ground.” He helps America’s businesses, from the very small to the very large, think their way to a better future. He has developed a formula for creating the future you deserve and applied it to the nation. The America Code began as a marketing exercise and evolved into a fresh perspective on the fundamental American operating system.

“American exceptionalism” doesn’t necessarily mean that America and Americans are better than other nations and nationalities. It simply describes the elementary fact that America is different, peopled by a disproportionate citizenry of Disenfranchised Diligent Optimists with a tendency towards Collective Congenital Amnesia who are Addicted to Personal Liberty. The future of America depends not on what we do but on who we are.

Based on a body of work encompassing more than 35,000 Americans, this book gets to the core of what makes America America and Americans Americans. The America Code is in our genes. It lies at the heart of how we got here – both literally and historically. It is the compass towards our future. The Code explains how we decide what we decide and why we value what we value. To the clever reader it also provides a blueprint for motivating and influencing Americans in the market, in the workplace, and at the voting booth.

The Code can teach us many things about the third largest country on the planet in terms of both land area and population. “American” is more a nature than a nationality. Being here doesn’t automatically make you American any more than joining a team makes you an athlete. But you don’t have to live in America to carry the America Code; which is why so many immigrants feel arriving here is more of a homecoming than a journey to a strange land.

The seven markers of the America Code are:

  1. We are disenfranchised diligent optimists.
  2. We are addicted to individual liberty.
  3. We subscribe to association rather than consensus.
  4. We are fueled by the principle of possibility.
  5. We are governed by a faith in something greater than ourselves – and certainly not the state.
  6. We are pragmatic combatants.
  7. We are collective congenital amnesiacs.

Forty-four percent of Americans are essentially active by nature. Forty-six percent are essentially inactive. Ten percent are re-active… and half of America is genetically coded to disagree with the other half.

We have met the Economy; and it is us!

The National Economy is a figment of our collective imagination. We need to be careful what we imagine and we need to be particularly mindful of how we are disposed to make the same mistakes again and again.

Krubski’s Program for the Nation includes: ·

Only accept the word “unprecedented” if supporting documentation is provided that covers at least the past 250 years. ·

Return clarity to the national discourse by repealing, rescinding, and rectifying the mandate of political correctitude. ·

Provide a basic primer for political discourse in America beginning with the notion that for everyone you think is wrong someone is equally convinced it is you who are wrong. ·

Remind ourselves that we are not supposed to trust government—not ours, not anyone else’s. That is the reason behind separation of powers. That is the rationale behind our Constitution. ·

Never ask the question “What has become of our country?” Nothing happens by itself—people are always responsible, and they usually have their reasons for doing what they do. To paraphrase a mantra from the Watergate era, “Follow the advantage.” ·

Never ask “What can I do?” unless you’re asking for instruction and willing to take it.