The Roger Kuperways Institute

Ideas for Business.
Philosophy for Life.

Learning should help us do more than know. It should help us live.

The Roger Kuperways Institute brings together a lifetime of entrepreneurship, university teaching, philosophy, mentoring and reinvention—with one purpose: to make useful ideas understandable, practical and human.

Why An Institute?

Experience becomes valuable when it can be shared.

I have spent much of my life learning in places that looked nothing like classrooms: a fashion workroom in Paris, a factory in New York, a business in crisis, a university classroom, a tango floor in Buenos Aires—and simply through the experience of getting older.

I have also spent decades teaching, questioning, advising and trying to make complicated ideas simpler.

The Institute is a home for those lessons.

Not theory for theory’s sake. Ideas we can actually use.

Areas of Exploration

Business, philosophy—and the human questions underneath both.

Entrepreneurship

Ideas are only the beginning. Learn how to think about opportunity, customers, business models, decisions, risk and turning an idea into something real.

Leadership & Judgment

Leadership is not merely authority. It is judgment, responsibility, communication, character and the ability to make decisions when the answer is not obvious.

Philosophy & Life

The great philosophical questions are not museum pieces. Happiness, fear, failure, purpose, love, aging and death are questions we live every day.

Reinvention

A life can have more than one beginning. Careers end, industries change, relationships change and circumstances change. The question is what we do next.

Practical Learning

Complex ideas become useful when they can be understood clearly and applied to real situations. The goal is not jargon. The goal is better thinking.

Mentoring

Sometimes knowledge is not enough. We need another person to listen, question, challenge, encourage and help us see possibilities we may have missed.

A Lifetime As A Classroom

I did not learn everything I know from books.

I left school young, entered the working world, built businesses, experienced success and failure, taught at New York University for decades, changed careers, taught tango, studied philosophy, wrote books and began again more than once.

Each chapter taught me something different. Business taught me about decisions and people. Teaching taught me the value of a good question. Philosophy taught me to examine assumptions. Life taught me that what works in one chapter may not work in the next.

The Institute brings those chapters together.

The Method

Complex ideas. Simple conversations.

Ask Better QuestionsBefore rushing toward an answer, make sure we are solving the right problem.

Think ClearlySeparate assumptions, fears and habits from what the situation actually requires.

Make It PracticalAn idea becomes valuable when it changes a decision, an action or the way we live.