Octavius Orlando Irvine Casati Black is a British businessman best known for founding the company The Mind Gym.
Early life
Black is the son of socialite Brinsley Black and his second wife, Lady Moorea Wyatt , who was the daughter of the Labour peer and academic Francis Hastings, and Cristina Casati Stampa di Soncino. Black's grandmother Cristina was the only child of Camillo, Marquis Casati Stampa di Soncino and Italian heiress and eccentric patroness of the arts Luisa Casati. Through his mother's earlier marriage to politician and diarist Woodrow Wyatt, Black has one older half-brother, Pericles Plantagenet Wyatt. Through his father, Black has a half-sister, Eliza-Jane. An Eton College school-friend of David Cameron, the pair and their wives have stayed close, though Black does not figure in his contemporary's Bullingdon Club photos from their mutual time at Oxford University.
Business career
After graduating from university, Black joined management consultants Booz Allen Hamilton as a business analyst, before joining the Robert Maxwell-owned AGB Research market research business. After the disappearance of Maxwell the businesswent into administration. Black joined employee communication consultancy Smythe, Dorward Lambert as their sixth staff member, going on to become sales and marketing director before it was sold to Omnicom in 1996. Between 2012 and 2014, Black wrote an occasional column in the business section of The Sunday Telegraph on the human aspects of business. Before that, Black, along with co-founder Sebastian Bailey, started The Mind Gym at his kitchen table in 2000. The company, which is listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange, designs and delivers corporate learning and development programmes. It offers 90-minute-long training sessions known as "workouts". The company serves 53% of S&P 100 and 61% of FTSE 100 companies via 400 qualified Mind Gym Coaches delivering in 40 countries. It operates from three offices. In February 2018the Mind Gym was listed in the Top 20 leadership training companies by the training industry and later that year was listed at No. 36 on the list of the Top 100 private companies with the fastest growing profits by The Sunday Times. With co-founder Sebastian Bailey, Black co-authored three books. Black's Parent Gym is a six-week parenting programme for parents of children aged 2–11. It is funded by Black’s commercial enterprise, Mind Gym and applies its corporate training knowledge to help teach parenting skills. It was piloted in 2010 and runs 150 programmes every year for parents areas including London and Brighton and Black said he hopes to roll it out nationwide.
