Peter Himmelman

Peter Himmelman is an Emmy and Grammy-nominated musician and songwriter, Himmelman’s distinguished career spans four decades.

As the author of the best-selling book, Let Me Out!, and founder of the creativity consultancy, Big Muse,

Himmelman channels his experience as a working artist to help corporate teams and senior executives transform their approaches to innovation, experimentation, and teamwork.

He engages your team in an interactive experience that will leave everyone more trusting, self-confident, and connected, generating a lasting effect that echoes beyond anyone workshop or keynote.

With timeless albums like This Father’s Day and From Strength to Strength, Peter Himmelman won a permanent place in the hearts of countless rock fans.

Now, the Grammy and Emmy-nominated musician channels his decades of experience in the creative arts to help companies build trust and resilience across their organization, fostering teams that are stronger, more innovative, and more engaged.

Peter Himmelman is the founder of Big Muse, a creative consultancy whose clients include the Gap, Adobe, McDonald’s, and other Fortune 500s.

He’s delivered his interactive programs to senior executives and students at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

His critically acclaimed book, Let Me Out, systemizes and simplifies the often arduous challenge of turning an idea into a reality.

Peter first came into the public eye as the frontman for the Minneapolis rock ‘n’ roll band, Sussman Lawrence.

In the 1980s, he launched a successful solo career, earning a reputation as “rock’s most imaginative performer.”

A committed family man and father of four, Himmelman limited his time touring in order to be with his family and eventually took a 9-to-5 job composing television scores so that he could spend more time at home.

He wrote the soundtrack for the highly popular drama Bones for four seasons and received numerous accolades for his work on the series Judging Amy, including an Emmy nod for his song, “The Best Kind of Answer.”

In addition to helping corporate teams across the U.S. access and unleash their own creativity, Himmelman continues to write and perform new music.

His insights on innovation have been published in Forbes, Time, and the Huffington Post.

Peter Himmelman’s Speech Descriptions
Boosting your organization’s innovation and productivity isn’t about “making your people more creative.”

It’s about making an environment where your people feel free to exercise their natural creativity.

Musician and innovation expert, Peter Himmelman engages your team in an interactive experience that will leave everyone more trusting, self-confident, and connected – the very dynamic needed to foster new ideas and growth.

With over ten years of experience creating in a corporate environment, Himmelman has a firsthand understanding of common constraints to creativity and growth as well as how to overcome them.

Since founding Big Muse in 2011, he’s helped organizations like Adobe, 20th Century FOX, and the Kellogg Executive Leadership Institute implement his methods hands-on, generating a lasting effect that echoes beyond anyone workshop or keynote.

Teams In Perfect Harmony: Creative Collaboration
Learn to develop an instant trust that will make your team powerfully co-creative.
You need four things to grow your business.
• Better creativity
• Better processes
• Better solutions
• Better products

The glue that holds any team together and allows these things to happen is trust.

It’s trust alone that reduces fear and allows teams to become co-creative.

The magic of Big Muse is that it allows you to quickly create trust.

So often Peter is asked: “Can you help make our people more creative”?

Through experience, he’s found that that particular challenge has less to do with “making people more creative” than it does with developing an environment that’s more trusting.

The people you employ have gone through an arduous vetting process.

They work for you because you believe they are highly competent and highly intelligent.

You pay them well for that competency.

Knowing that, Peter doesn’t frame the solution around “bringing out” creativity, but rather, on how to create the trust that allows it to effortlessly shine forth.

A few years back, he had an experience working with a large company that drove this idea home in a powerful way.

Like many other organizations, they asked him: “Can you help make our young leaders more comfortable with creativity?”

On the day of the workshop, Peter Himmelman was dismayed to see members of the company’s upper management team in positions around the room wearing grim faces,

Each of them holding clipboards in their hands, and taking notes on the performance of each of these young leaders as he went through his program.

‘How could anyone be expected to be creative in this hostile —almost punitive environment?’ he wondered.

Peter learned a simple, but an essential lesson that day: Intelligent people are creative by nature, all they need is an environment of trust and their creativity will burst forth.

Whether it’s a workshop or a keynote, Big Muse’s special advantage over other programs is that Peter uses creativity to generate creativity.

He’s not pedantic.

He doesn’t overdose people with Powerpoint.

Most importantly, he doesn’t just yammer on about data points, or what the research says; he engages your people in visceral, creative projects that allow them to actualize the information.

Whether it’s song, poetry, artwork, or storytelling, Peter and his team put together an experience that will leave your people feeling more trusting of one another, more connected to the mission of your company, and most importantly, more trusting in their own creative capacities.

Peter Himmelman

Amping Up Innovation: Silencing Marv The Inner Critic
MARV: Majorly Afraid of Revealing Vulnerability®.

If you’re human, you’re already well acquainted with MARV. He’s the voice of fear in all of us. We know from experience that Marv works too hard. He’s terrified of failure, shame and vulnerability. As our internal-critic, Marv’s job is to protect us from those “awful things”. (And he takes his job seriously!)

When Marv offers us his negative judgment, he’s only trying to help.

But in doing so he stymies our growth and creativity. Taming him will lead your organization to greater competitiveness, adaptability to rapid change, and to greater productivity overall.

This Big Muse program gives participants techniques to short-circuit the brain’s native tendency towards fear, which allows them access to new creative possibilities.

M.A.R.V. stands for (Majorly Afraid of Revealing Vulnerability®).

Marv is our metaphor for your internal critic. Learn to silence him, fearlessly share your ideas, be deeply creative, and grow in your personal and professional life.

Your people will learn key tools to keep Marv at bay while they free their minds to do their best work.

Employees that are overly focused on negative judgment, whether externally imposed, or from their own destructive thinking, may well be the single biggest inhibitor to your company’s success.

While other programs and speakers simply speak to the issue of overcoming fear, Big Muse programs are super-interactive.

This interactivity includes having your people write original songs (whether individually or in groups) about key company concerns, new outlooks, social issues (you name it),

songs that will later be performed by the Big Muse band and myself to create a powerfully resounding culmination to the session.

Instead of being told how to act or how to feel, participants in a Big Muse session absorb information in a potent, visceral, and unforgettable manner.

Developing Effective Leaders
It’s axiomatic; if you can’t self-reflect, you can’t know yourself.

If you can’t know yourself you can’t lead your own growth.

you can’t lead your own growth you can’t lead others.

Learn to take control of your career and your life, so both you and your teams can perform better and lead more fulfilling lives.

One of the keys to being resilient in these times of unceasing flux and disruption is not only to know your values, but to examine them, to write about them,

and then… to make a plan to bring those values into every part of your life.

Words like courage, loyalty, honor, and integrity have sadly fallen into disuse.

They are considered by many to be things found only in old movies and on Hallmark greeting cards. Peter and Big Muse think about those words very differently.

Peter Himmelman

They believe that core values are what’s missing in today’s mercurial business climate; a sometimes, less than humane place, where many leaders appear to be clawing their way to some mythical “top” —in spite of the consequences to stakeholders, employees, and society at large.

They also believe that a deep exploration into values, ideas of purpose, and of an overall sense of contributing to mankind, is not only moral, it makes strategic business sense as well. Here’s why:

You may have read the studies, they’re everywhere; the ones that say that employee disengagement is at an all-time high —around 70% internationally.

That means that 70% percent of your people are just phoning it in.

Those same studies point out a figure that’s even more disturbing; 20% of that 70% are actually working against the goals of your company, they are conspiring against precisely what you are working towards.

Peter Himmelman feels strongly that disengagement at that level comes about when people sense the company they are working for does not have strong values.

They become dissatisfied when they think the only mission statement is to shore up the bottom line.

While keeping numbers up should be a priority, if that’s all your company stands for in the minds of your employees, it’s going to be nigh on impossible to keep them around for long.

As human beings, we are motivated far more by a sense of purpose than we are by simply filling our personal coffers.

In this important session, (primarily geared to upper management), Peter creates conversation around both the costs and the benefits of allowing talented people to their creative muscles, to utilize their native creativity, and to put their innovative solutions to good use.

Clearly, the benefits far outweigh the costs.

Increasing Employee Engagement
Experimentation is a necessary part of your path to success.

Learn to treat it as a positive experience so that it becomes a catalyst, rather than an inhibitor to personal and professional growth.

Without the ability to try new things, employees become bored, and their boredom invariably leads to frustration.

That frustration leads them to either, look for another job, or stick around to become a member of the aforementioned, 70% disengagement club, (or worse, the 20% company saboteur club)!

Peter knows a young woman who works for a large international food chain.

After hearing her speak about her frustration with having to deal with the company’s complex hierarchy and its intrusion into even the smallest decisions, he felt her pain.

She admitted two things that stuck with him:

1.) She could accomplish so much more at her job if only she were given the opportunity to implement some of her own solutions to existing problems.
2.) She puts in only three hours of valuable work per week. The rest of the time she deals with a snail-paced, creativity-stifling bureaucracy.

In this Big Muse session, Peter Himmelman doesn’t simply talk; he creates active scenarios in which leaders can safely explore their fears around experimentation.

He creates a lasting resilience to those fears so that they no longer stand in the way of achieving your goals of retaining talent, recruiting talent, and staying competitive.

As human beings, we are motivated far more by a sense of purpose than we are by simply filling our personal coffers.

Without the ability to try new things, employees become bored, and their boredom invariably leads to frustration.

Engagement isn’t a survey or a point on a graph; engagement is people coming together with passion to find creative solutions that make real, tangible change.