The Workshop Creators

Stever Robbins is the co-writer, co-lyricist, and performer of the show. He is a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School, he has been a serial entrepreneur, computer programmer, management consultant, top-10 iTunes business podcaster and author of Get-It-Done-Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More.

Host of the #1 iTunes business Get-It-Done-Guy podcast, which has received more than 23 million downloads on iTunes, Stever has collected a vast intellectual treasure trove of information about personal productivity.

Stever has extensive experience helping people master new skills. He has worked with business executives developing business and leadership skills in his consulting practice, designed curriculum at Harvard Business School, run interactive simulatinos with Profitability Business Simulations, and been an advisor and mentor to senior managers in a variety of high-growth companies.

Stever holds degrees from Harvard Business School and MIT. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program, a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP, and a Certified Executive Coach.

Stever has appeared on CNN-fn’s Entrepreneurs Only, ABC News New, MSNBC, FOX News, and NBC Nightly News. He is a featured expert in Harvard Business School Publishing’s Harvard Manage Mentor, and he appears in Houghton-Mifflin’s forthcoming Skillbuilders series as an expert on critical thinking and memory. He has also appeared in print in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, BusinessWeek Online, Investor’s Business Daily, Harvard Business Review, The Boston Business Journal, Entrepreneur.com and Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge.

Joel Derfner is composer, co-writer, co-lyricist, and hand-holder for the show. Joel is from South Carolina, where his great-grandmother had an affair with George Gershwin. After fleeing the south as soon as he possibly could, he got a B.A. in linguistics from Harvard. A year after he graduated, his thesis on the Abkhaz language was shown to be completely wrong, as the word he had been translating as “who” turned out to be not a noun but a verb. Realizing that linguistics was not his métier, he moved to New York to get an M.F.A. in musical theater writing from the Tisch School of the Arts.

Musicals for which he has written the scores have been produced in London, New York, and various cities in between (going counterclockwise). In an attempt to become the gayest person ever, he joined Cheer New York, New York’s gay and lesbian cheerleading squad, but eventually he had to leave because he was too depressed. In desperation, he started knitting and teaching aerobics, though not at the same time. He hopes to come to a bad end.