Why business leaders must embrace the responsibilities of citizenship #36

Hi Everyone and Welcome Back!

This week on The Nick Halaris Show we are featuring civic leader, Michael Kelly.  Michael is the Executive Director of the Drucker Institute and the longtime leader of the LA Coalition for the Economy and Jobs, an innovative civic activist group here in Los Angeles.  With a long history working at the intersection of government and business, he has an impressive track record as a passionate advocate for practical, progressive solutions to the big problems of our day.    

Ready to dive in? Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and Youtube or on your favorite podcast platform.

When I joined the LA Coalition back in the pre-pandemic days, Michael and I became fast friends over a shared passion and vision for what it means to be a good citizen.  I wanted to have Michael on the show to discuss how he’s using his new role at the Drucker Institute to advocate for better leadership, governance, and corporate citizenship and to explore some the lessons he’s learned from a lifetime of service and activism.  Tune-in to this fascinating episode to learn:

How companies are using insights and ideas from Peter Drucker’s legendary body of work to not only achieve exceptional financial results but also become better corporate citizens

  • The relationship between globalization and the decline in effective corporate citizenship

  • Why the best companies in the world are so focused on people (especially their own employees) and community

  • How ego often gets in the way of effective pro-business policy collaboration

  • Why businesses struggle to wield collective political influence and end-up relying so much on issue-specific lobbying

  • How Michael’s passion for working to create a better world and one simple cold-call to a campaign office led him to an entire career working at the intersection of government and business

  • & Much, much more

We also learn how the powerful example of Michael’s father, a teacher who dedicated himself to service and citizenship, provided the impetus for Michael’s own inspiring journey.

As always, I hope you all enjoy this episode.  Thanks for tuning-in!     

Love this episode? Please rate, subscribe, and review on your favorite podcast platform to help more users find our show. 🙏 Thank you

Nick Halaris

I’ve been fascinated by investing for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I would read the Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Barron’s, pouring over the data tables, stories and interviews with a passion and an insatiable kind of curiosity. As I grew into adulthood, I struggled to find the right outlet and channel for this passion and spent much of my twenties wandering and trying out different things. I had a very brief career as an attorney, spent some time as a strategy and leadership consultant for big multinational companies, failed in an attempt to start a hedge fund, and even ended up helping run a scrap metal recycling operation for a while.

At the age of 30 though, I took my stand. I made up my mind that no matter what I was going to be an entrepreneurial investor. As crazy as it sounds, I owe everything in my life to this one foundational decision—even my amazing wife and my beautiful kids. I don’t think I would ever have met Alicia had I not made this one choice. At that moment in time, the financial world had just been devastated by the crash in the housing market and the near systemic failure of the global banking system that followed. I’ve always had a contrarian bent to my investment thinking; so, to me the carnage in real estate looked like an opportunity.

It all started with one house in Compton California. The business plan was simple: buy a distressed foreclosed home from a bank, bring it back to life with a big renovation and sell it to a first-time homebuyer. Things progressed slowly as they tend to do with real estate. In the first years of this, I think I did 6-7 homes. But then after plugging away day-by-day, suddenly it seemed, things just came together. I found the right investors and the right loans and the right deals and in just a few short years I ended up investing in over 100 such transactions, building a portfolio of almost 2,500 multifamily units and creating a fully vertically integrated real estate company with almost 100 employees.

Fast forward to today and I’m running the second evolution of my entrepreneurial investing career and having so much fun that I have to stop and remind myself that this is all real.

http://www.nickhalaris.com
Previous
Previous

How to Solve the Big Problems of Modern Democracy #37

Next
Next

How to win the battle against addiction #34