024: EllenMarie McPhillip, Kyle Kingma and Ellen McPhadden (Hyperion Council)

Hyperion Council on Innovation City

“Your approach to business has to be about doing the small things right.” —EllenMarie McPhillip

Welcome to Innovation City—powered by Venture Cafe St. Louis and Venture Cafe Miami—where Tyler Kelley and Michael Johnson, Co-Founders of SLAM! Agency, interview innovators, creators, and disruptors to discover how business is evolving in the modern world.

Innovation City gives you a behind-the-scenes look into the next generation of world-changing organizations. As business and culture continue to change at an extraordinary pace—thanks to increasing diversity and inclusion, greater connectivity, and heightened creativity—you can stay ahead of the curve, find out what’s coming next, and who’s going to bring it to market.

On today’s episode, Tyler and Michael are at the eMerge Americas conference, recording at the University of Miami booth. Their guests today are EllenMarie McPhillip, Kyle Kingma, and Ellen McPhadden. Today’s topic is the Hyperion Council. EllenMarie McPhillip is the Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Business Education at the University of Miami Business School. Kyle Kingma is the incoming Secretary General for the Hyperion Council. Ellen McPhadden is the outgoing Secretary General of the Hyperion Council.

The Hyperion Council was founded in 2002 to help first-generation university students and future business leaders build strong moral compasses and ethics, and then actively share best practices in business administration with at-risk communities. They work with women entrepreneurs and youth entrepreneurs in places as widespread as Overtown, Santo Domingo, and Jamaica to help them change the way they do business. Find the Hyperion Council on Instagram @UMHyperion.

They discuss:

• Moving from transacting to building wealth
• Doing the small things right
• Using the assets of technology, human capital, and community engagement to build stronger societies
• The hard work of changing behavior to change lives
• Inclusion
• Building trust in at-risk communities
• How US business leaders’ choices impact people around the globe
• Building wealth in a way that serves the community around you
• Learning to separate your personal and business assets
• The international aspects of the Hyperion Council
• Working in Lima, Peru with Spray Wash, which cleans cars without using water
• Finding businesses throughout Latin America by cultivating relationships
• Whether technology/automation is a bad thing
• Informal economies, where money moves in an “under-the-table” fashion
• Students searching for a way to impact their communities
• Shaping American business practices to fit other cultures