Dr. Alan M. Blum has been a practicing chiropractor in San Diego for over 40 years and has been studying kinesiological muscle testing techniques for over 30 years. A national speaker, he has invented or innovated several groundbreaking kinesiological muscle testing techniques and has taught many of those techniques at the Total Body Modification Research Seminars.

Dr. Blum’s greatest joy is helping to heal people. Experiencing firsthand severe stress and severe chronic fatigue, he spent years looking for solutions and created some groundbreaking techniques to heal others and teach them how to have more energy, combining chiropractic practices. The chart below shows the various areas of the spine and how it controls various aches in our body.

Noushin Dunkelman, founder and president of MaxSynergy Consulting, graduated from UCSD with a degree in bio-mechanical engineering. She has over 30 years of product development, management, team building and coaching experience in small to midsize companies.  After years of working on the technical side, 5 years ago she decided to refocus her career in helping companies with their organizational challenges.

At MaxSynergy Consulting, she works with companies to find out their internal problems and provide custom practical solutions that meet each company’s needs such as improved communications, develop and implement new skills and tools and train them on actionable feedback to create accountability.  She also coaches experienced executives and new managers to further develop their leadership skills.

She talked about the tactical aspects of communication and that the key reasons why people communicate are to problem-solve and exchange ideas.  Relationship provides better communication and how listening is a very key aspect of proper communication. She says that humans have 2 ears and 1 mount and so focus more on "listening" .  One key fact she stressed on was the primary misunderstanding people have about giving feedback. People feel that the person providing the feedback has control over the change they seek in others. That is not true at all. The change can happen only if the person receiving the feedback takes action to make that change. The person giving the feedback must be very clear about the reasons for that feedback and that makes for a far better communication. 

In the end DMSB Club President Ken Barrett presented the speaker with the Joshua certificate that represents our club DMSB donating school supplies to schools in Malawi in the name of the speaker.

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Next we had Leonid (Leo) Kandinov from Robbins Arroyo give a talk on "Taking Action Against Investment Losses" that impacts many shareholders and corporations. His colleague Ajit Narasimhan was also in the audience.

Mr. Leonid Kandinov is an attorney at San Diego based Robbins Arroyo LLP. Mr. Kandinov represents individual and institutional investors and consumers in complex litigation, specifically focusing on shareholder rights, securities fraud, and antitrust matters. For his efforts on behalf of his clients, Mr. Kandinov has been recognized as a Super Lawyer Rising Star in 2016, 2017, and 2018.

He indicated how corporate management discusses many things in board meetings that are confidential and they get leaked out leading to major shareholder risk and losses. Tesla was a glaring recent example when its CEO Elon Musk announced taking company private without any written confirmation. That led to major losses for the shareholder, for the company and for him personally.

They represent plaintiffs on a pro-bono basis and only gets paid from the proceeds that comes out of settling the case. It seems that total investor losses have reached almost $334 Billion! The team at Robbins Arroyo works diligently with their clients to ensure that illegal activities by corporations are corrected and secure any compensation for the losses. Recently they did a "Shareholder Derivative Action" against the board and/or executive members of Facebook and they took Mark Zuckerberg into deposition and finally settled the case for some amount.

They monitor "insider trading" issues and other illegal activities that causes a company's stock to fall. Western Union was another example of money laundering that they faced about 5-6 years ago. The company had to pay over $35 million in fines. The sad part is that in some cases, when the company pays the fine it is eventually coming out of the shareholder's pot but in many cases the insurance companies cover that cost. Eventually, as more regulations are put in place the stock recovers. UPS was another interesting case where they were caught shipping illegal cigarette cartons (683,000 cartons) and these were ending up in the hands of under-age kids. They proved that this was happening with full knowledge of the UPS executives and the judgement was a fine of $247 M to New York state and city.

Overall, this was a very educational talk and members really enjoyed it since there were several good questions. He encouraged people to sign-up for StockWatch as it is a FREE service to all clients. There is no cost to the client since the payment comes out in the end from legal settlement costs.