“Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy,” Or, Optimal Engagement in the Workplace
April 10, 2024
When I first heard Michael Stipe cry out that line from the R.E.M. song What’s the Frequency Kenneth? something about it stuck with me. And it still resonates with me today. I was relatively new to the workforce, and that one line said a lot about what I saw every day in my workplace. I was surrounded by incredibly bright, capable people who, on the surface, seemed at best apathetic. Were they really apathetic,…
Read more
Ditching the Easy Fix at Victor Valley College
February 27, 2023
If you’re always implementing an easy fix, you’re probably looking at all your problems as technical issues rather than complex, adaptive ones. But it can be hard to find the motivation. Not to mention the time to peel back the layers of those big, intractable issues and devise solutions. Here’s a pep talk in the form of an example from Victor Valley College in Victorville, California, where McKenzie Tarango is the Dean of Instruction,…
Read more
How the City of Albuquerque Grows Entrepreneurial Thinking From the Inside Out
January 25, 2022
Many cities have worked to attract entrepreneurs over the past decade. Albuquerque, New Mexico, is among them—but in an innovative twist, the fast-growing Southwestern city also worked to foster an entrepreneurial mindset from the inside out. City leaders aren’t looking for municipal employees to start their own businesses. Instead, they’re following the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative’s definition of entrepreneurship as the self-director pursuit of opportunities to create value for others. Here’s the story of how…
Read more
Cultivating Curiosity: The New Learning Imperative
May 30, 2019
Photo by Stephen Hickman on Unsplash Learn How to Think (and Act) Like an Entrepreneur Part 4/8 Among the most distinguishing characteristics I’ve noticed among entrepreneurs, is an unusual desire to learn. It’s not that they are great students in the traditional sense, (in fact, in many cases, it’s quite the opposite) yet they always seem to be engaged in learning, usually through non-formal and informal means. For example, they learn through observation and inquiry,…
Read moreSteidle: The future of work is entrepreneurial
November 30, 2018
Why do so many people not understand the power of entrepreneurship? Perhaps the word “entrepreneurial” gives them hives or they have no idea how the word even applies to them. After all, they are not interested in starting a business so why should they care? Ice House Facilitator and founder of the Innovation Agency, Samantha Steidle answers this question and more in a blog post initially posted in the Roanoke Times. Read Now …
Read more