Kevin Olusola
Most organisations treat creativity as a culture problem rather than a method. They want their people to think differently, then revert to the same planning rhythms that produce the same answers. The gap shows up most clearly when a leadership team sets an ambitious goal and has no shared language for how to actually start.
Kevin Olusola is the Grammy-winning beatboxer and cellist of Pentatonix who uses live performance to teach senior teams a working method for ambitious goals and cross-disciplinary innovation.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Kevin Olusola
- He performs the argument rather than narrating it. The “Foundation +1” idea (start with one simple element, add one layer at a time) is built live on stage through cello and beatbox, so the audience sees the method before they hear the framing.
- Three Grammys with Pentatonix and a Sony recording contract give him a credibility profile most innovation speakers cannot match, particularly with audiences sceptical of corporate creativity content.
- His route into music sits next to a Yale East Asian Studies degree and extended fellowship time in Beijing, which gives the cross-cultural innovation material genuine personal weight rather than a borrowed example.
- Opened TED2014 in Vancouver and was hand-picked by Quincy Jones for the 2012 Montreux Jazz Festival, alongside Bobby McFerrin and Chick Corea. He has worked at the level of stage where corporate audiences notice.
Biography highlights
- Three-time Grammy winner with Pentatonix: Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella (2015 and 2016) and Best Country Duo/Group Performance (2017 with Dolly Parton).
- Won NBC’s The Sing-Off season three with Pentatonix, leading to a Sony Music Entertainment contract.
- Opened TED2014 in Vancouver with a celloboxing performance.
- Selected by Quincy Jones to represent him at the 2012 Montreux Jazz Festival, on a programme with Bobby McFerrin and Chick Corea.
- Yale University, East Asian Studies, with pre-med coursework. Spent extended fellowship time in Beijing and became fluent in Mandarin.
- Pioneered celloboxing, the simultaneous playing of cello and beatboxing; his viral 2011 video of Mark Summer’s “Julie-O” led directly to his Pentatonix recruitment.
Biography
The first time most audiences see Olusola on stage they are watching a method, not a performance. A single scale on the cello, a single percussive sound, then another, then another, until a Daft Punk medley or a Pharrell track is built in front of them out of parts that were obviously small a minute ago. He calls the underlying idea “Foundation +1”, and it is the spine of his corporate keynote work.
The performance credentials sit behind the method. Pentatonix have won three Grammys, signed with Sony Music Entertainment after winning NBC’s The Sing-Off in 2011, and built one of the largest a cappella audiences on YouTube. Olusola opened TED2014 in Vancouver and was selected by Quincy Jones to represent him at the 2012 Montreux Jazz Festival, on a programme with Bobby McFerrin and Chick Corea.
The cross-cultural material runs in parallel. Olusola read East Asian Studies at Yale with pre-med coursework, and spent extended fellowship time in Beijing where he became fluent in Mandarin. The idea of “celloboxing” itself came from a teacher in China, who asked him whether he had ever considered playing cello and beatboxing at the same time. The biographical detail is doing real work in the keynote: it gives a specific story for how stepping into an unrelated domain produced an original artistic form.
For senior teams, Olusola is closer to a performing keynote than to a conventional management speaker. The intellectual content is light, the demonstration is heavy, and the value sits in how an audience leaves thinking about creative method and ambition. He suits openings, closings, and offsite moments where the brief is to shift the room rather than to teach a framework.
Key speaking topics
- Creativity as a working method
- Cross-disciplinary innovation
- Ambitious goal-setting and execution
- Cross-cultural perspective and collaboration
- Team dynamics in creative work
- Performance keynote and corporate entertainment
Ideal for
- Annual kick-off and conference opening or closing slots
- Leadership offsites focused on creativity, innovation, or culture
- Awards dinners and high-profile client events
- Internal events where a sceptical senior audience needs a non-standard creative input
Audience outcomes
- A shared, memorable reference point for breaking ambitious goals into a starting move
- A concrete example of how cross-disciplinary thinking produces original output
- A genuine performance moment that anchors the rest of the agenda
- A reframing of creativity as practice rather than personality
Talks
A live celloboxing performance that demonstrates how a single starting element, iterated one layer at a time, becomes a finished piece, used as a working model for ambitious organisational goals.
Key takeaways:
- A repeatable mental model for starting on goals that feel too large to begin
- A demonstration of how constraint, not freedom, produces creative output
- A memorable performance reference that teams can use long after the event
A talk on drawing creative input from unrelated domains, anchored in how Olusola built celloboxing from classical cello technique and hip-hop beatboxing.
Key takeaways:
- How to identify creative inputs from outside your sector
- Why imitation across domains is a route to differentiation
- How to introduce cross-disciplinary practice into a corporate environment
Built around Olusola’s time studying in China, this talk argues for stepping into unfamiliar contexts as a route to original thinking.
Key takeaways:
- The case for personal disruption as a leadership discipline
- How cross-cultural exposure shifts creative output
- Why diverse perspectives change the questions a team asks, not only the answers
A talk on team harmony built from Pentatonix’s working dynamics, where five distinct musical roles combine into one sound.
Key takeaways:
- How clarity on individual contribution improves collective output
- Where ego shows up in collaborative work and how to manage it
- What corporate teams can borrow from how a band actually rehearses