Your Curated Morning (#136) for April 25, 2024 is here!
7 days ago • 6 min readThe Main Thing: As a member of the International Economic Development Council’s certification process, one is required to sit through an ethics briefing session at an annual conference every two years. Ethical considerations are important and even more so in this age of digital transparency. The internet never forgets and any ethical mistake can be magnified to the point it can hinder your career or ability to make money in the future. Over the past week, I wrote a series of blog posts...
READ POSTYour Curated Morning for April 18th, 2024 is here!
14 days ago • 6 min readThe Main Thing: Culture Change What would you say if I asked you to describe your organization's or city's culture? Someone leading a high-energy organization might say, “We’re aggressive and proactive, move quickly, and have a sense of urgency.” That is very descriptive, but what does it mean? The danger is that someone in the organization might use different words or ideas to describe the culture. They may say, “We’re mean and nasty, work too much, and we often forget about what’s...
READ POSTYour Curated Morning (#134) for April 11th, 2024 is Here!
21 days ago • 8 min readThe Main Thing: They say all the cool kids are doing it. "It" being AI. This technology has been around for a while but has taken the world by storm in the past year with the release of many AI platforms for general use. It excites many people but scares some, too. So, how can you use AI in a way that makes sense, improves your team performance, and enhances your organization's efforts? Applying simple rules to AI and anything else you do works best. I write about my experience in the...
READ POSTYour Curated Morning (#133) for Thursday April 4th is Here.
27 days ago • 6 min readThe Main Thing I am facilitating a cohort of young Economic Development leaders. The topics and themes of the cohort are leadership and charting your course in the profession. In one of our first meetings, we discussed overcoming obstacles to success. However, what is an obstacle? When one thinks of an “obstacle race,” one thinks of a contest where contestants race around a track or course, jumping over barriers, crawling through tunnels or the mud under a matrix of rope or wire, and...
READ POSTYour Curated Morning (#132) for Thursday March 28th is here.
about 1 month ago • 7 min readThe Main Thing: What can be said about safety? Our bains have evolved to the point that practically everything we do is to assure our safety. It makes sense that people need to feel safe to have a positive culture in your business or orgainzation. Safe physically, emotionally, and psychologically. In this fourth and final post on positive culture in organizations and communities, I will discuss how a community can achieve this type of safety. A leader can also do deliberate things to create...
READ POSTYour Curated Morning (#131) for March 21, 2024 is here!
about 1 month ago • 6 min readThe Main Thing: In my third post in a series about the essential glue for a positive economic development culture in your community, I discuss the concept of a shared future. Without a shared future that everyone agrees to and believes in, a positive culture can’t exist. I have seen this in several communities. While the community postures as one that wants and sees economic development as a positive thing, some in the community would work to disrupt things. They would gladly tip over the...
READ POSTYou Curated Morning for March 14, 2024 is here!
about 2 months ago • 5 min readThe Main Thing Last week, in the Main Thing, I wrote about the requirements for a positive culture in organizations and cities. Daniel Coyle's ideas from the book The Culture Code are the inspiration for what a positive culture looks like in a city or town. They include the following: Do members of the organization feel connected? Do they share a future? And do they feel safe? Over the next three weeks, I will explore these ideas and see how they apply to organizations, communities, and...
READ POSTYour Curated Morning (#128) for February 29th, 2024 is Here!
2 months ago • 7 min readThe Main Thing: America is filled with a "can-do" spirit. Songs like New York, New York with its line, "If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere," might as well refer to the entire country. That is why so many people want to be here and live here. Some say that immigrants come here to take advantage of our system of welfare and social services and that they burden the system or take away jobs from Americans. If that were true, they should go somewhere else because, as far as I can see,...
READ POSTYour Curated Morning (#127) for February22nd, 2024 is Here!
2 months ago • 8 min readThe Main Thing: Shoes and Taxes I want to write a book about how cheap we are as Americans. Don't get me wrong, I love my country, the people, the institutions, and the freedoms we have. But let’s face it, we are a bunch of cheapskates (an old school word which has now been replaced by ‘cheap f*****s’) for those not familiar with language from the sixties and seventies. We aren’t willing to pay the real price for our lifestyles and what we want. So many of our public-facing arguments center...
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