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About Me

“Claude Whitmyer is one of the most thorough, versatile and effective consultants I know. The breadth of his business knowledge and his demonstrated commitment to integrity and social responsibility make him a uniquely gifted business advisor and management consultant.
“Claude is a deep water community builder and networker. He was in on the ground floor of the PC revolution in the ’80s and has learned his way up with it, inventing and evolving many useful solutions. He has tirelessly supported right livelihood approaches to business, and other sensible strategies for the new century.”
“Claude is a seer of extraordinary sagacity. He has helped me and many others into developing a clearer view of self and one’s potential and uniqueness. He is also a pleasure working with in developing organizational capacity for excellence.”
Claude is a thorough teacher and a knowledgeable mentor. Under Claude’s tutelage and supervision, I experienced dramatic growth, both professionally and personally.”
“The people at FutureU are creative thinkers and revolutionary educators, combining technological sophistication with highly developed people skills. A pleasure to work with, reliable, thorough and innovative.”

Welcome!

Claude teaching at Columbia College of California

Claude teaching at Columbia College of California

I am Claude Whitmyer and this is my personal web site. I work as a free agent in the overlapping areas of the business, education and technology niches.

Writer, teacher, consultant—researcher and analyst—these are a few of the many hats I wear comfortably.

I connect to the core of my passion, the bliss I want to follow (grin), when I can work as a

  • coach
  • guide
  • advisor
  • mentor and
  • livelihood guide

. . . to those who want to . . .

  • do what they love
  • live their values
  • make a meaningful contribution and
  • still pay the bills.

You can learn more about the two primary forms this takes

For 30 plus years, I have been the coordinator of the business and social network known as the Briarpatch (history); a network of friends in business aspiring to right livelihood and simple living).

Here are a few different forms of my life map:

I have written numerous articles and reviewsfor popular, professional and academic publications.

You can read my Author Bio at Smashwords.Com and find links to several volumes that are my latest work.

In addtion to numerous e-books I am an author of three print books so far:

  • Mindfulness and Meaningful Work: Explorations in Right Livelihood, Parallax Press, 1994 (Foreword by Ernest Callenbach).
  • In the Company of Others: Making Community in the Modern World, Tarcher/Putnam, 1993 (Foreword by Eric Utne).
  • Running a One-Person Business, Tenspeed Press, 1989, Second Edition 1994 (Foreword by Tom Peters).

(Order my books from Amazon.Com.)

About FutureU™

In 1997 I co-founded The University of the Future, LLC (aka FutureU™) with my wife Gail Terry Grimes. Together we help people meet, learn and work together no matter where they are.

Our specialty is to use the process of choosing distance communications tools as an incubator for birthing, growing and maintaining highly productive and deeply rewarding virtual teams, virtual networks and online communities.

More and more in today’s economy, successful small businesses are relying on the age old business model of vendors in a town market. They are identifying their own strengths, skills and know how and finding the niche markets those can best serve. This approach to focusing on service to their customers, helping them solve their problems and meet their needs feels almost tribal. Engaging them in conversations, listening carefully, finding the tribes that their knowledge and skill sets can best serve feels very much like the traditional way that village market functions.

And then there is the Internet—today’s great equalizer—it allows small businesses to compete with larger ones in ways not possible even 10 or 15 years ago. Now you can create niche businesses to serve an almost limitless number of niche markets.

It was this transition to niche-focused business models supported by an Internet platform that led me (and Gail) from our life-long consulting on traditional business matters to the inclusion of working, learning, and collaborating at a distance in our portfolio. As you might guess, we have naturally helped many small, micro and one-person businesses and non-profits to learn how to take advantage of the best advantage of the Internet. And, we are among those that have been doing this the longest.

Ironically, though, because of our expertise in this area, we have been sought out larger organizations in the corporate, government, healthcare, and higher education arenas. These bigger clients have varied widely in both sector and geography. Here’s a few examples, among many, of those we have worked with to develop online communities and use the Internet for meeting, working in teams and delivering training or educational content:

  • American Hospital Association’s Healthcare Forum Fellowship programs
  • NASA Astrobiology Institute
  • Health Sciences Simulation Center at Samuel Merritt University in Oakland, California
  • The Big Apple Green Business Virtual Network sponsored by the Consortium for Worker Education in New York City
  • Open Learning Division of Thomson Rivers University in British Columbia
  • Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Arecibo
  • King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Our primary focus is still the smaller organizations, but we continue to serve larger ones as the come along.

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