“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 morePlanting Seeds of Entrepreneurial Thinking—With a Homegrown Twist
October 13, 2021
One of the preeminent entrepreneurial thinkers in higher education lives and works in an unlikely place: a metro area of 246,000 residents just a couple of hours south of the Canadian border. Bree Langemo, lawyer and educator, exemplifies ELI’s definition of entrepreneurship. That is the self-directed pursuit of opportunities to create value for others, whatever the field or location. Langemo directs the Entrepreneurship Center at Concordia College’s Offutt School of Business in Moorhead, Minnesota.…
Read moreA Florida College Removes Barriers to Entrepreneurship Education
September 10, 2021
The Broward College Entrepreneurship Experience (BCEx) is an ambitious framework designed to expand ideation and value creation among the college’s 63,000 students. In addition to creating thousands of entrepreneurs, the bigger goal is to create a culture shift that instills an entrepreneurial mindset across Broward College—impacting faculty, staff, and students. BCEx uses the Ice House model to introduce entrepreneurship as the self-directed pursuit of opportunities to create value for others, whether in their business…
Read more
A Managerial vs. Entrepreneurial Approach to Leadership
August 31, 2021
You might have seen the recent Inside Higher Ed article published in March of 2021 titled “Colleges a ‘Juicy Target” for Cyberextortion.” As if mask mandates (or lack thereof), vaccination hesitancy, the Delta Variant, and all the other disruptions that we’ve seen over the last 18 months aren’t enough, now cybercriminals have our schools in their crosshairs. And it’s not just higher ed institutions that are at risk. Someone could soon find my 5-year-old niece’s…
Read more