Rinaldo S. Brutoco

Rinaldo S. Brutoco is the Founding President and CEO of the World Business Academy.

Rinaldo is a successful entrepreneur, executive, author, radio host, and futurist.  He has published numerous cutting-edge articles and books that address the role and responsibility of business in relation to the critical moral, environmental, and social concerns of the day.  He is a regular keynote speaker at conferences and guest lecturer at business schools such as Stanford Business School, the Columbia Graduate School of Business, the Kellogg Graduate Business School at Northwestern University, and the Keenan-Flagler Graduate School of Business at North Carolina University. For over 35 years, Rinaldo has been widely recognized as a practical visionary and change agent.

Rinaldo served as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Board of the Chopra Foundation from 2014 to 2017, and currently serves on the Board of the JUST Capital Foundation, which he co-founded in 2013. On the Board of JUST Capital, he serves on the Executive Committee, as Chairman of the Audit & Finance Committee, and on the Nomination and Governance Committee.

Rinaldo has served on the Board of Directors of the $3.5 billion in annual sales, men’s clothing company, Tailored Brands, Inc. (formerly Men’s Wearhouse), between the time of the company’s initial public offering in 1992 until June 2019.  In addition, he has co-founded and served on numerous non-profit Boards, including the Gorbachev Foundation of North America, the Omega Point Institute, and the National Peace Academy.  He also served as Founding Chair of the Unstoppable Foundation, on whose Board he served until 2017. He was co-founder of the State of the World Forum and one of 5 co-conveners of the Social Venture Network’s inaugural meeting at Gold Lake Colorado.

Mr. Brutoco is an economics and business expert specializing in energy policy, renewable energy, finance, innovation, and the causes of, and adaptation strategies for, climate change. For his entire career, he has been an international leader in advancing the nature of good corporate governance, corporate accountability, business transparency, and ways that corporations can fulfill their social compact by providing goods and services that the public needs in financially prudent ways that are simultaneously consistent with sustainable environmental and employee compensation policies. He received a Congressional Commendation to this effect in October 2010 for his outstanding contributions to the field of corporate responsibility.

Mr. Brutoco served from 2011-2014 as a Senior Hydrogen Advisor to Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, then Director of Naval Research. Additionally, Mr. Brutoco was contacted by Stanley Weiss, the founder of BENS (Business Executives for National Security) to assist Don Carlsen in opening the first BENS chapter in California.

At the age of 25, in 1972, Mr. Brutoco became the youngest attorney to argue before the California Supreme Court in the case of California Public Interest Law Center v. Public Utilities Commission.  As Founder and Principal of the California Public Interest Law Center, he won what was, at the time, the largest class action lawsuit in the history of the United States.

As a merchant banker, Rinaldo has run a start-up, high growth, and turnaround practice for more than three decades, in which he regularly dealt with forensic accounting, restructuring, operations, and finance. In this work, he was required to serve as an acting CEO, Board Member, Chairman of the Board, and to function in other senior management roles in order to turn his clients’ companies around or to guide them successfully past the start-up phase. In this capacity, Mr. Brutoco was appointed by the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. as one of three Directors in charge of United Press International (UPI) the first time the company went into bankruptcy, with the task of taking over, running, turning around, and ultimately selling its five television stations (in major markets like Chicago) and over 240 radio properties that were held in a UPI subsidiary.  He successfully completed this task, returning the proceeds of these sales to the parent company, on whose board he sat while keeping all of these stations out of bankruptcy, turning them around, and selling them for a substantial profit all within 18 months.

As an entrepreneur, Mr. Brutoco has spearheaded several businesses. He is: Principal and Chief Executive Operator of the ShangriLa Group, Inc.; Founder, Executive Chef and CEO of Seven Oaks Ranch, an organic food company; and Founder and CEO of Live Well Brands, Inc., an organic cosmetic manufacturer with distribution in over 3,500 outlets in the United States, each growing at high compounded annual rates. Co-founding Channel 100 in 1972, Mr. Brutoco was the Executive Vice President and COO of the first company in the world to offer pay cable television services; and was the Founder and CEO of Universal Subscription Television in 1978, one of the first companies to offer over-the-air television transmissions of major motion pictures. He was also the founding Chairman of the Board for organic probiotic beverage company, KeVita, which was one of the fastest growing organic probiotic beverage companies in history, and that sold to Pepsi in January 2017.

Additionally, Mr. Brutoco served as the CEO and Chairman of the Dorason Corporation, through which he was the sole distributor for 10 years of Mother Teresa’s personally endorsed biographical motion picture, Mother Teresa (1986).

Based on issued patents that he filed beginning in 2009, Rinaldo is also the Founder, Chief Designer, and Chief Technical Officer of H2 Clipper, Inc., which is a revolutionary, hydrogen-powered dirigible development initiative that utilizes advanced aeronautical design, 100% green energy, and advanced materials technologies. He has also received patents for: 1) advanced “Swarm Robotics” technology that includes using stationery and ambulatory robots working together with a common mind to assemble large manufactured devices utilizing conventional robotic programming, artificial intelligence programming and generative artificial intelligence; 2) a large flying dirigible designed for drone delivery (only one of three patents in the field where one is held by Amazon and one other by Walmart) and pick up of packages from rural areas and urban rooftops; 3) a block chain methodology for assessing the input source, output source, and flow of any gas molecule in a pipeline for the purpose of objectively verifying molecules of lesser and greater value (e.g. hydrogen) that must be precisely identified for sale or to collect on tax rebates; and 4) the technology for safely moving hydrogen down a pipeline without losing a single molecule thereby preventing massive safety risks from occurring and from preventing any hydrogen molecules from escaping to the upper atmosphere.

In the 1980’s, Mr. Brutoco conducted complicated analyses of tax shelters. This work was reviewed by the United States Tax Court, and Rinaldo was nominated for, and approved as, a tax expert for all purposes without restriction in connection with his provision of testimony in complex cases before the tax court as an “Expert” witness.  Mr. Brutoco is currently designated as a financial expert for purposes of reporting to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In 1997, Mr. Brutoco co-authored Profiles in Power: The Anti-Nuclear Movement and the Dawn of the Solar Age; and in 2007, he co-authored Freedom from Mid-East Oil, a comprehensive treatment of the energy and climate change landscape. In 2019, he authored a whitepaper entitled The Methane Accelerator, which describes why forecasts of the extent and severity of climate change made as little as five years ago by the world’s foremost group of climate scientists are turning out to be grossly understated and suggests what must be done about the crisis to avert the end of civilization as we know it by 2050.  He has also published hundreds of articles on a wide variety of subjects, some of which have been featured in well-known national publications such as POWER Magazine, H2Tech, and PV Magazine.

Core areas of Rinaldo’s work include clean energy, climate change analysis and mitigation; sustainable business strategy; values-driven leadership; the development of the human potential at work; global reconstruction; and innovative financial products for Socially Responsible Investment (SRI).

 

Current Positions:

• Chairman and CEO, H2 Clipper, Inc.
• President, World Business Academy
• Board Member, JUST Capital
• Principal and CEO, The ShangriLa Group
• President and Board Member, Omega Point Institute, Inc.
• Chairman, Seven Oaks Ranch, Inc.
• Chairman, Live Well Brands, Inc.
• Chairman, Optimist Daily

 

Books:

• Co-Author, Freedom from Mid-East Oil – a comprehensive treatment of the world’s energy challenges, climate change and solutions for the future of energy. Focused on nuclear power, oil, wind energy and hydrogen (World Business Academy, 2007). ISBN 978-0-9794052-2-8
• Co-Author, Profiles in Power: The Anti-Nuclear Movement and the Dawn of the Solar Age – a college textbook on nuclear energy. (Twayne/Simon & Schuster, 1997) ISBN 0-8057-3879-7
• Principal resource to the authors: Winning the Innovation Game by Denis Waitley and Robert Tucker (Fleming H. Revell Company, 1986) ISBN 0425115313
• Creator and Contributing Author, New Paradigms in Business. (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993) ISBN 0-87477-726-7
• Contributing Author, Birth 2012 and Beyond. (Shift Books, 2012) ISBN 0-9848407-0-0
• Author, Lift Off: The Rise of the Hydrogen Economy. (Waterfront Digital Press, 2014) ASIN: B00J9NHRZA

 

Publications:

• Hindenburg: The Untold Story
• A Tale of Two Vehicles: Exploring BEVs and Hydrogen FCEVs
• Beyond Ammonia: Rethinking the role for ammonia within a vibrant H₂economy—Part 1
• Autonomous Solar-Powered Catamarans for Enhanced Marine Cloud Brightening
• The Role of Fuel Cells within a Microgrid System
• Nuclear Power: Totally Unqualified to Combat Climate Change
• Neo-Currencies: Flying Buttresses Can Stabilize the Shaky Euro
• Ascent of the Phoenix: Global Reconstruction
• From Current Business Paradigm to the Second Renaissance
• The Market is Lying: Why We Must Tax Carbon, Not Subsidize It
• Stop Carbon Subsidies: Make the Market Tell the Truth
• Taxpayers Subsidize Big Oil, World’s Most Profitable Industry
• Japan’s Nuclear Kamikazes: A Morality Tale of Energy Madness
• The Upcoming Nuclear Peril: Worse than the BP Oil Disaster
• Nuclear “Spin-Co”
• The President’s Leadership Challenge: A Call for Bold Action
• “Spellcasters”: The Hunt for the “Buy-Button” in Your Brain
• Copenhagen: A Bigger Opportunity Than Climate Change
• The True Story about “Climate Cover-Up“
• Pellet Power: Coal Power Substitute
• Community Self-Reliance: A Local Currency Model
• Saving the U.S. Economy with “Trickle-Up” Economics
• The Wisdom of Two Generals
• The Cure for Automakers’ Crisis? File Chapter 14
• The Nuclear Nemesis Redux (Forum CSR International)
• An Economic Solution Through Service, Not Greed
• The Nuclear Nemesis, Trends (American Bar Association), Vol. 39, No. 5
• Nuclear Power: A Mistake in Search of a Mission
• “Iraq”: Exit from a Quagmire
• Living in the Questions: The 2006 Global Mind Change Forum
• The New Paradigm of Corporate Governance: The Buck Stops Here
• The New Paradigm of Corporate Governance: Tribal Values – Guidelines for CEO Succession
• The New Paradigm of Corporate Governance: The Demise of the Imperial CEO

  

Keynote / Expert Speaker (Selected):

• Global Hydrogen Panelist with German & Canadian Government representatives – Paris Peace Forum (November 2023)
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology Forum of the Central Coast (Feb. 2013) The Hydrogen Future: Transitioning Away from Dirty Power
• Sustainable, Responsible Investing Conference (October 2012) In conversation with Mindy Lubber, President of Ceres The Practice and Politics of Aligning Business Interests with Human Interests
• Sages and Scientists Symposium (March 2012) Eight Basic Human Rights, Climate Change and The Global Marshall Plan
• Cortona International Trans-disciplinary Conference (September 2010) The Role of Business at a Time of Conscious Evolution
• Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Center for Sustainable Enterprise, Distinguished Speaker Series (March 2008) Lemons to Lemonade: Environmental, Social and Economic Sustainability as a Sustainable Business Advantage
• One-week residential program developed jointly , and taught jointly, with the Dean of the Kellogg School of Management
• Guest Lecturer at the Stanford Business School
• Program lead for half day program with the Barcelona School of Management for senior management of BMW

 

Past Service (Selected):

• Executive Committee Board Member, Chopra Foundation
• Founding Board Member, The Gorbachev Foundation
• Co-Founder and Board Member, State of the World Forum
• Board Member, Center for Earth Concerns
• Founder, California Public Interest Law Center
• Board Member, Men’s Wearhouse and Tailored Brands

 

Recognition (Selected):

• Congressional Commendation recognizing Mr. Brutoco for his leadership in business (November 2010).
• Effie Award for Advertising Effectiveness, The American Marketing Association (1981)
• Ellis Island Medal of Honor, The National Ethnic Coalitions of Organizations (2016).
• Peace Prize, United Nations Association USA – Santa Barbara & Tri-Counties Chapter (2017).

 

Education:

• Bachelor of Arts, Santa Clara University, 1968, graduated with honors, earning a degree in Economics and Philosophy.
• Juris Doctor, University of California Los Angeles School of Law, 1971, Order of the Coif, and other academic awards.