Gabe Karp
- Partner at Detroit Venture Partners
- Conflict Resolution and Negotiation Specialist
Travels From
Michigan
Gabe Karp Speaker Biography
Gabe Karp is a globally recognized expert in leadership and high-performance teams, renowned for his ability to help organizations transform challenges into competitive edge. His bestselling book, Don’t Get Mad at Penguins: And Other Ways to Detox the Conflict in Your Life and Business, is an entertaining and enlightening masterclass on his proprietary system to effectively leverage conflict to fuel success, forged from three decades of research and practical experience.
He is an Operating Partner at Detroit Venture Partners, a Detroit-based venture capital firm that backs early-stage technology companies. He is also a Venture Partner at Lightbank, a Chicago-based venture capital firm, and serves on several boards of companies in the DVP and Lightbank portfolios.
Previously, Gabe was the Executive Vice President and General Counsel of ePrize, Inc. (now Merkle), an interactive promotions company representing 75 of the top 100 brands in the world. Gabe was instrumental in growing the company from a small startup to the world’s leading digital promotions company. He has built and led successful teams, negotiated business and finance deals in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and frequently speaks on embracing healthy conflict.
Crain’s Business named Gabe as General Counsel of the Year for the state of Michigan in 2011. Gabe spent the first decade of his professional life as a trial lawyer/litigator. He was a partner and shareholder of Hurwitz, Karp, Wallach & Gantz, P.C., where his practice included complex commercial litigation, class-action litigation, and legal malpractice (suing other lawyers for screwing up)—talk about conflict!
Gabe and his wife Rachel have three wonderful daughters, and he is an avid heli-skier (Yep, that’s skiing from a helicopter).
EMBRACING PRODUCTIVE CONFLICT
Many of us learn at a young age that conflict is a bad thing and should be avoided at all costs. All of us have a million years of fight or flight reflexes hard-coded into our genes. If left unchecked, these create the foundation for destructive conflict at the organizational and individual levels, destroying cultures, companies, and careers. Through his highly engaging storytelling style, Gabe unpacks the 5 danger traps of conflict and their disastrous outcomes, offers easy-to-use tools to avoid those traps, and how to leverage conflict for productive means. This is 30 years of experience as a Conflict Expert and Growth Leader talking.
Your audience will learn to:
• View conflict as a productive driver of success for organizations and people
• Identify the dangerous traps of conflict that take us into destructive territory
• Use simple but highly effective tools to embrace conflict to fuel success
• Increase your empathy toward others
• More effectively communicate in all areas of life
