Steven Palter & Michele Lang: An entrepreneurial pair that is transforming how global crises are solved.
The Strategic Coach Team
Steven Palter and Michele Lang are not only brilliant entrepreneurs, but innovators who are changing the way we solve problems around the world. They’re partners in life and business, with Gold Coast—an in vitro fertilization clinic—and Lodestone, a technology platform that allows experts and audiences to interact, innovate, and solve problems in real time.
But like most businesses, they were not immune to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. “For us, there was just sort of a line in the sand that happened in our clinical practice, because we got an email one day saying, your entire practice is shut down,” explains Steven.
“But at the same time, we realized that we had the solution with our technology platform, because when there is a crisis and people don’t know the solution, our platform leverages the community to come together and instantaneously solve it.”
“We had the crisis and the solution at the same time.”
As Steven explains, they “kind of had the crisis and the solution at the same time.” Steven and Michele found themselves in a unique position to use their business to not only transform their industry, but save lives while doing so.
“We first figure out what the crisis or lack of knowledge is within a topic in a specific industry,” Steven says. “We then do a pre-event analytic with the audience where we get to their deepest concerns and where they’re most concerned. And we use that to craft the event.”
Steven and Michele go on to explain how their events are unlike anything else. This is not just a webinar or a video conference—they connect speakers with the audience to create a constant feedback loop that sparks innovation.
“We have an event where the world’s experts are speaking, but they’re not the final arbiter,” Steven says. “They’re on the panel, but instead of speaking to many, the many are now interacting with them and closing the loop.”
This innovative system allowed medical experts from around the globe to come to a consensus on how to approach the coronavirus pandemic. It both multiplies and simplifies by exponentially increasing the amount of data and communication, and then boiling it all down to come to a point of consensus at the end.
So, how did this all happen? It all comes down to Steven’s Unique Ability.
“He didn’t see the demarcations that the rest of the people did.”
Michele explains how Steven’s Unique Ability allowed him to create something no one else could. “Steven has this ability to connect people from separate silos. He sees the commonalities where people who are fully within a sole discipline may not see the connections.”
“In medical school, he connected people who were working in the same city who had never spoken to each other. He didn’t see the demarcations that the rest of the people did, and it really changed the game. That’s just how Steven does things.”
That Unique Ability helped Steven create Lodestone, but it was also one of the reasons why he was drawn to Strategic Coach.
Steven tells the story of how eye-opening his first Strategic Coach event was, saying, “We brought together people from 60 industries and said, ‘What’s the commonality?’ And we didn’t assume to know what it was before we started.”
“We took 60 discrete industries, and at the end, they felt like one group of people working together.”
Through their time at Strategic Coach, Steven and Michele have seen the value in the many thinking tools and exercises available to them—some of which have played a vital role in how they operate their businesses. By homing in on their Unique Ability and core values, they were able to easily make crucial business decisions and create a path to success at a time when it mattered most.
“Truly, without Coach,” Michele says, “I don’t know how we would have been able to do this—how to think about the problems, how to deal with uncertainty.”
Steven adds, “When you’ve got all these competing possibilities, options, dangers, and opportunities, you really need a pathway to sort through it—and that’s certainly been Coach-inspired.”
In addition to the mindset and thinking exercises that helped them through this crisis and will get them through many more, the Strategic Coach community was ever present.
“It’s been remarkable, just the number of people in Coach who have reached out both to get information, to help, and to solve the problems of the world,” Steven says. “It’s the most incredible community to be a part of.”
Faced with competing possibilities, dangers, or opportunities? Our practical tools were designed to give you a new perspective on your business and help multiply your success. Get a taste of The Strategic Coach Program by accessing our online tool collection here.
