Los Altos, Other Area Rotary Clubs Recruiting For Enterprise Leadership Conference

The Rotary Clubs of Campbell, Cupertino, Los Altos, Saratoga, Sunnyvale, and Sunnyvale Sunrise have launched the 6th annual Enterprise Leadership Conference– a three-day training program at the Asilomar Conference grounds in Pacific Grove for high school juniors.

These five Rotary Clubs of District 5170 will recruit 60 students from local area high schools for the Conference. The students are divided into 10 teams of three girls and three boys, and all from different high schools.

At the Conference, business leaders, drawn from Rotary membership and local businesses, present key business concepts such as management structure, finance, marketing product/service development, and human resources, in a seminar environment.

The challenge to the students is to use these concepts to develop a virtual company with a virtual product or service. Time for team building and recreational activities is also included.

On the concluding day of the Conference, each student team presents their company business plan to a panel of Rotarian judges. The teams are evaluated on the degree to which they have applied the enterprise principles to create a company and their skills in presenting their vision to the judges through their business plan.

The three-day conference will begin with a keynote address by Steve Jurvetson, a partner with Draper-Fisher-Jurvetson. Among his many accomplishments, Steve has developed executive marketing, sales, engineering and business strategies for a wide range of companies in the software, networking and semiconductor industries, including Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Rethink Robotics, Planet Labs, D-wave, Synthetic Genomics, as well as Hewlett-Packard’s PC Division, Apple, and NeXT Software.

“The students really take to this program,” Joseph Ribera, coordinator for the Sunnyvale Rotary Club reports. Student comments following this past year’s conference, included:

“This program seems to be the answer to the apathy in my life.”

“This was so helpful and more informative than any AP or College Prep class.”

“I got to learn about business essentials, it was fun, informative and productive.”

Recruitment at local schools is now underway. Deadline for student applications to the program is December 19, 2014. For more information go to www.elcsvw.org or contact Wil Houde or Mark Linsky at rotary.elc.svw@gmail.com.

Rotary International is a 1.2 million member humanitarian service organization with 34,000 clubs in over 200 countries.