Madman Pierre's Businesses and Business history Madman Pierre's Investment advice and Investing options
Madman Pierre's Fun and Educational information, some Investments too
Madman Pierre's personal pages including how Peter Horwood became known as Madman Pierre. You may want to read these before investing with him. Think of it as step 2 in a good investment stradegy!

Great links for investments, investing and products, including my own personal experiences with most of them.
Tips and tools for learning languages, primarily for English speakers.

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Madman's Lectures

I have had the privilege of serving many thousands of people with lectures over the years, starting in about 1990. These lectures range from "command performances" to groups as small as 8 or 10 in Germany, to larger groups of hundreds and thousands in Canada and the US. Although I have given lots to groups smaller than 8, usually I consider those to be "consulting" because in smaller groups typically we are heavily interacting and there is no formal "prepared" speech, just a list of topics we want to cover/explore.

Typical Topics

The lectures most often are on one of the following topics:

  • Entrepreneurship. Talking about challenges both mental and external, getting the right mindset, managing stress, how to decide whether to keep going, marketing, partners (why, when, when not.)
  • Managing development projects. I especially enjoy discussions discussing management of teams that are not physically located. I have been running development teams spread across multiple time zones since the late 1980's - long before the World Wide Web came into place.
  • Specific technologies or techniques (Computer software/hardware, Photographic)

Typical Audiences

The audience or location has varied greatly, a range of examples is:

  • CEO's/CTO's gathered by SUN and aRenDeeco to discuss practical use of Java back when Java was not yet popular
  • Students interested in starting their own company at the University of Calgary (several times over several years)
  • Interational Entrepreneur Association (Knowing when to proceed, Knowing when to stop.)
  • European Client/Server conference (Practial Object Oriented Development)
  • Airdrie Koionia Christian School: (various topics)
  • Swiss PBUG. (Project management, Java, PowerBuilder, C++)
  • Chicago PowerBuilder Users Group (Intra-corporation & Multi-office Object Oriented development)
  • Microsoft FoxPro conference in Toronto (many many years ago<g> Discussing advanced development techniques with FoxPro.)
  • AAII developers conference (Time management, Development, Project Management)
  • Various topics for local Church

Can Peter speak at "your event name goes here"

Now-a-days, I seldom speak "for free" except for the Church I attend and the School my kids go to. (My kids go to a private school, so government funding is very limited so I am happy to teach for free in this environment. Topics at schools have included Entrepreneurship, Photography, Aviation and, believe it or not, cooking.)

My rates for lectures depends on several factors including

  • Where it is: Close is cheaper, far is more expensive, exotic (to me) is cheaper. Of course the 3rd time I go somewhere it is no longer exotic, even if it was the first 2 times! But some places, like Switzerland, I am always interested in visiting because of the many friends I have gathered there. For what it's worth some places I'd currently give discounts to visit include: Central America (Especially Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua), Hong Kong and many parts of China, Japan (October/November - the season to obtain Nish-Ki-Goi) Japan is the only one I haven't been to yet, the others, I've been to multiple times, but still would return and consider it cheaper for you.
  • What extra business or personal benefits there are. If you have a group of investors looking to invest, and they are in the Calgary/Reddeer/Lethbridge areas, chances are I would be happy to come and I may just do it for free, or outside of Calgary/Reddeer/Lethbridge, for the cost of the budget travel expenses, even if the topic requested is not about the company that is looking for investment! Or, if the location is exotic and you offer to bring my wife, chances are you'll get a positive response. Or if the location is in North America and you offer to bring my family (and my kids are not in school at that time).... Well, you get the idea, feel free to approach me with your offer, the worst I could do is politely say no.
  • What the topic is: The less time it takes for me to prepare, and the more I am interested in the topic, the less I will charge.
  • What else I planned to do that date.
  • How far ahead I am booked. The earlier you book me, the less I charge because I can arrange myself.
  • Years ago, one "trick" that some of my long term associates in Europe have done when arranging a "free" lecture is to line up some specific consulting to be done at the same time. The consulting paid for the trip including the lecture, so they got the lecture for free. But now-a-days, business opportunities are of greater interest to me.

 

  

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