Out of the Ordinary

About the Book

As a person who has spent my life on the intersection of creativity and innovation, I have watched our country’s businesses and society stagnate. What do I mean by stagnate? We have become a nation of followers. We have been taught, largely through our educational system to perfect the already known. In school we try to master the standardized tests. The best test takers get the high-profile jobs and help to perfect the processes already in place. Meanwhile, in a country built on ingenuity and hard work, the creative thinkers are dwindling or being muzzled. Commonplace thinking would lead you to believe some people are highly creative, while others have little to no creativity. That same thinking would also make you believe that some people are born to be leaders and other followers. I am here to say that is false. Everybody is born with creativity. The question is, are you encouraging creative thinking, or have you suppressed it to follow the status quo? Not only will I debug the notion that some people are not born creative, or leaders, but will show you how to become a leader that is creative, innovative, and courageous.

About the Author

Michael Balch has long been on the sales and distribution side of the asset management business. The asset business is littered with mutual funds, separately managed accounts, ETFs, hedge funds and other money managers. There are far more asset management products than there are stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The thing about these money managers is that they are very similar in what they are trying to accomplish. For all intents and purposes, they are just another commodity. The successful companies are the ones that CREATIVELY differentiate themselves from the masses. This is something that Michael has excelled at over his long career. What he does translates beyond the asset management business into most industries. In his field of sales and distribution, Michael is widely known for being CREATIVE, being able to reposition his products in a way that they stand out in the overcrowded world. This ability has won him many awards.
Michael Balch will write, in this “notebook,” about his learning disability and how this worked to his advantage. He was forced to use other skills to survive and then excel at school and in his career.
He went to Indian Mountain School for grade school, where he was diagnosed with Dyslexia. He later learned to overcome his learning disability at Berkshire School (High School) and Lake Forest College.
In business, Michael has overcome this obstacle to succeed with investment firms like Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and Kemper. He took what he learned at these great firms and set out on his own, where he was a founding Partner at NAV Capital before joining Cedar Capital as Partner. He currently resides in Wilmette, IL with his wife and four sons.