100: Think Outside the Box with Dr. Steven Fredericks

Dr. Fredericks is an educator and international business professional with more than 30 years of management experience and academic achievements in the United States, Europe and China. His professional education career began as an elementary school teacher in the Fort Apache section of the South Bronx, New York. In addition to his teaching duties during regular school hours, he also created and ran all of the after school programs. In addition to his work during the day, he attended the Graduate School of the New School for Social Research where he received a Master’s Degree in Political Science. He was then recruited to help run an urban education graduate program at Indiana University where he also pursued and received a doctorate in Education. Dr. Fredericks then joined the Graduate Faculty of the Bank Street College of Education where he was the Chairman of the History, Principles and Philosophy Department and Professor of Ethics and Educational Philosophy. During his tenure at Bank Street, he also consulted with the government of Venezuela in creating the curriculum for the state run universities.

During this phase of his career, Dr. Fredericks enrolled in an MBA program at New York University and received an MBA in Finance, at which time he was recruited by IBM, where he began a long and varied career in business, eventually spanning industries ranging from technology to Hollywood film making to internet start-ups to advertising. Of note, he worked in Paris as the head of Financial Planning and Analysis for IBM Headquarters responsible for Europe, Middle East and Africa. Additionally, after IBM, he helped start and operate Digital Domain which became the largest digital visual effects studio in the world and received Oscar awards, Grammy awards and nominations for work on movies including Titanic, music videos and television commercials. He then proceeded to lead a variety of companies as the Chief Executive Officer and was an Adjunct Professor of Entertainment Finance at New York University at which point he was recruited to, in a sense, return to his roots in the field of Education by the Sports & Arts in Schools Foundation.

Dr. Fredericks has been particularly effective in engaging financial, technical, and marketing organizations to conceptualize and achieve complex business parameters both strategically and tactically. He has delivered speeches and made presentations around the world on a variety of topics including an invitation by the Chinese Ministry of Trade to address business and educational leaders on the potential for the Chinese film making industry to both train and eventually compete on a world class basis. This presentation resulted in Dr. Fredericks being named to the Board of the Center for Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong. He also, during his tenure as CEO at TNS Media Intelligence, authored a book titled, StraDegy, Advertising in the Digital Age which was extremely well received as it argued that unless industries engaged in, and adapted to, emerging digital technologies, they would find themselves falling further and further behind their new competitors who wholly embraced the digital age.

The Sports & Arts in Schools Foundation (SASF) has, under Dr. Fredericks’ direction as Executive Director, become the largest provider of after school activities spanning sports, arts and academics in the United States. It provides these activities in the schools, Kindergarten through High School, to over 25,000 students annually. Dr. Fredericks was asked to join SASF in order to professionalize and grow the organization. He very successfully achieved this and it currently employs over 4000 paid staff annually and has revenue of over $40M. In addition to his duties at SASF, he also serves on the Board of Advisors of the School of Education at Indiana University and has consulted with educators and academic researchers at Indiana University, Harvard University, University of Connecticut and Johns Hopkins University.

Finally, it should be noted that Dr. Fredericks has achieved the following distinctions: named Man of the Year at Indiana University; President of his Fraternity, Delta Upsilon; elected to lifetime membership in the Indiana University Foundation; 2^nd Lt. U.S. Army; named to Top 100 BtoB Marketers by BtoB Magazine (2005/2006/2007); author of articles on the Future of Advertising, Educational Policy and Values Education; and solicited for a variety of Keynote Speeches and Media appearances.

Quotables

• You can’t run away from the public school system
• If you are going to be a teacher, you need to know what your subject matter is
• Can everybody become a teacher?
• Not everybody is charismatic
• If its a bad experience, its almost impossible to era...