Mark Ross

MARK ROSS is a longtime media producer, investor and entrepreneur, with more than 35 years in the business of entertainment. He is the co-founder and CEO of Acme Innovation, a holding company that invests in and operates disruptive media and entertainment companies using blockchain technology. He has financed a multitude of entertainment-related companies and startups including Music Audience Exchange, Riptide Music Group, Dequency, Project M, and Audigent, the world’s leading entertainment and media data collection and management platform. He is also the co-founder with Sir George Martin of GrandMaster Music, a boutique production music library, which he sold to Sony Music. As a music executive, he signed several multi platinum artists, most notably Pantera, that have sold tens of millions of records. He is also the former Executive Director of Quincy Jones Productions, and founded and operated his own imprint label through Universal Music Group. Throughout his career Mark has been fortunate enough to work with a wide variety of artists and greats such as Michael Jackson, Alicia Keys, YK Osiris, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Ray Charles, AC/DC, Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, Andrea Bocelli, Metallica, and Frank Sinatra, and has forged strong personal and professional relationships with entertainment professionals across the industry.

Christina Gerakiteys

Christina Gerakiteys is a catalyst for change, alchemising impossible to possible through the unleashing of human potential. Her purpose is to facilitate the road to a Utopic society, through the opening of hearts and minds.

Christina is on a mission to enable the enablers and to empower and inspire leaders to converge minds, technology and fields, to have maximum impact and solve humanity's grand challenges.

As CEO of UtopiaX, Co-CEO of SingularityU Australia and Founder of IdeaSparx, Christina is a sought-after speaker, facilitator, and program designer, creating interactive educational experiences driven by design thinking, purpose, engagement, and play. The programs disrupt current mindsets to Moonshot thinking, exploring what is possible, rather than what is acceptable or limited. Christina has created highly customised programs for clients including Deloitte, IAG, Employment Hero, Entrepreneurs Organisation, Austrade, Bupa, Investa and Dulux.

Christina has presented key-notes and workshops for the Singularity University COVID-19 Summit, Entrepreneurs Organisation, Singularity University Global Summit, Front End of Innovation Conference in Boston, SingularityU Australia Summit, Vivid Ideas, Creative Innovation and Inspiring Women Leaders Digital Conference in Madrid.

Christina writes for several publications, hosts the SingularityU Australia Webinar Future Leaders series, the podcast Inspire for Impact, and speaks on radio about creativity and innovation. She is a contributor to the award-winning Front-End Innovation blog. She is an ambassador for Tech Central, Sydney, on the International Advisory Board for W Startup Community and sits on the Hunter Medical Research Foundation.

Christina is an advocate for innovation committees, produced the annual Hunter Innovation Festival, and lectures in Business, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She is a lifelong learner, undertaking doctorate studies in Creativity and Innovation.

About The Course

Are you tired of seeing failure as a negative experience? Do you want to change the way your organization perceives and responds to failures? Then this course is for you! "Celebrating Success One Failure at a Time" is an intermediate-level session designed to help you internalize a celebration of failure as a critical step towards success.

Led by Christina Gerakiteys, author of the book with the same title, this 30-minute session will challenge you to reframe the way you look at failure in your organization. You will learn how to leverage failure to help your teams and organization succeed. By the end of the course, you will be able to recognize that failure is not an end but one of many steps on the path to success.

Imagine a world where failure is celebrated, and its lessons are viewed as ways to improve. Imagine a culture in which failure unites people to work towards success. What great changes could take place if this mindset was embraced? Join us in this course and learn how to create a culture of celebrating failures and ultimately achieve greater success.

About The Book

Fail fast! We hear it all the time. Who really walks the talk? Entrepreneurs, that’s who. Failure and success are closely intertwined, and if we are lucky, failure leads – and is subsumed by – success. Christina Gerakiteys explores the interplay of failure and success through interviews with seven entrepreneurs – renegades and changemakers from both established and startup companies – who all share the mindset and qualities we know they need to succeed: courage, resilience and determination. These entrepreneurs have learned, sometimes the hard way, that each failure is a step toward success.

The business failures frankly explored in this book are failures that you can learn from, if you so choose. They are the failures the innovation community considers par for the course, even desirable, yet they are the ones entrepreneurs are often crucified for. They are the failures that result in a few entrepreneurs losing their confidence. But some don’t.

Christina Gerakiteys reveals the secrets of those who achieve the breakthroughs, those who “get lucky”,those “overnight successes” that were ten years in the making. These are the ones with the passion, resilience and determination to pick themselves up again after they “fail”.When asked why they stuck at it, they reply, “Because I just knew it would work”.