Rebecca D. Costa

Rebecca Costa is a popular speaker at corporate events, technology and thought-leader conferences, and major universities. Her entertaining and informative presentations reveal how mounting complexity causes individuals, organizations, and societies to become gridlocked, succumb to irrational decision-making, and eventually falter. She demonstrates how that pattern can be broken by changing how we approach highly complex problems. Charismatic, conversational and often humorous, Costa weaves memorable anecdotal stories with leading-edge science.

1. Combating Corporate Complexity

Using the Venture Capital Model, Rebecca Costa explains how corporate executives can effectively manage and overcome the growing complexity of procedures, global organizations, new technologies, and more — the key to breaking the cycles of corporate gridlock, slow growth and decline. Costa reveals what scientists have now discovered about the relationship between complexity and sustainable growth.

1-hour presentation followed by 20-minute question-and-answer period.
2-hour workshop also available.

2. Recession and Recovery

By adapting laws drawn from nature, Rebecca Costa shows how any “drive toward uniformity is a drive toward extinction,” revealing how increasing uniformity in global economic markets has lead to a historic worldwide recession. She presents innovative remedies that governments, corporations, and private citizens can implement to arm themselves against a “cascading downward spiral of global markets.”

1-hour presentation followed by 15-minute question-and-answer period.

3. Insatiable Instincts

In an entertaining and humorous presentation, Rebecca Costa demonstrates how the vestiges of prehistoric instincts become obstacles to personal, social, and corporate progress in the modern world.  She examines the biological reasons we are wired to hoard, cheat, lie, consume more calories that we need and compete, even when we recognize these behaviors are not in our best interest. Costa explains how these instincts can be indentified and managed for the greater good.

45-minute presentation followed by 30-minute group discussion.
1-hour workshop also available.

4. The Tempo of Technology

Rebecca Costa contrasts the accelerating tempo of technology against the slow tempo of human evolution to reveal how a “gap” between the two rates causes gridlock to occur. Using examples from her career in Silicon Valley, she shows how shorter and shorter development and product life cycles result in overwhelming complexity and what can be done to surmount these challenges.

1-hour presentation followed by 20-minute question-and-answer period.

5. Sustainability and Success

Using colorful and amusing examples from nature, the laws that have dictated sustainability for billions of years are skillfully applied to dangerous modern problems such as global warming, pandemic viruses, a worldwide recession, terrorism, and other challenges. Rebecca Costa shows how these seemingly intractable problems can be solved by replacing quick-fix mitigations with long-term, sustainable solutions.

40-minute presentation followed by 15-minute question-and-answer period.

6. Excellence in Education

Innovative solutions that are being used to “catch-up” education to the demands of modern life are revealed in this eye-opening overview of the biological obstacles educators face today. Rebecca Costa shows how our cognitive capabilities begin to fall behind the rate at which complexity is accelerating. She offers constructive tools that can be used to close the growing gap between what we know and what we need to learn to keep pace on the “learning curve.”

1-hour presentation followed by 30-minute group discussion.
2-hour customized workshop also available.

7. Hope for Healthcare

Rebecca Costa examines the complexity of the modern healthcare system and unravels, piece by piece, the reasons for — and solutions to — the gridlock that has thwarted meaningful solutions. She presents an insightful, multi-faceted approach to removing the “silos” and outdated economic models that prevent today’s healthcare providers from delivering the highest patient care at the lowest possible price to the greatest number of people.

1-hour presentation followed by 20-minute question-and-answer period.

8. A Weapon of Mass Instruction

In this highly entertaining presentation, Rebecca Costa reveals what neuroscientists have recently discovered about how the human brain can be “tuned up” to load content more quickly, and solve highly complex problems. She discusses the important role “insight” plays in surmounting our greatest challenges, as well as evidence that certain activities not only encourage higher cognitive functioning, but also may fend off diseases such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, and others that affect information processing.

50-minute presentation followed by 30-minute group discussion.
3-hour workshop available.

9. The Crucial Balance Between Beliefs and Knowledge

With stories drawn from today’s headline news, Rebecca Costa demonstrates how easy it is to substitute unproven beliefs for proven facts when day-to-day complexity becomes overwhelming and makes facts indiscernible or too complex to grasp intuitively. Using the collapse of the Mayan, Roman, Khmer, Egyptian, Ming and Byzantine empires as examples, she reveals the importance of pursuing a balance between beliefs and knowledge and the dangerous consequences that result when one dominates the other.

50-minute presentation followed by 20-minute question-and-answer period.
2-hour workshop also available.

To schedule a speaking engagement
please contact:

Mr. Wes Neff
The Leigh Bureau
92 East Main Street, Suite 200
Somerville, New Jersey 08876
908-253-8600
info@leighbureau.com

In Europe please contact:

Leigh Bureau, LTD
14 Adelaide Street
Dun Laoghaire
Co. Dublin, Ireland
353-1-230-2322
europe@leighbureau.com