Best Practices for Organizing Conferences Within Organizations
Internal conferences foster human connection and learning in hybrid work environments. They encourage team alignment with organizational goals and promote intrapreneurism. Successful conferences require careful planning, collaboration, and alignment of personal and organizational priorities. Integrating fun elements enhances learning, creating engaged and innovative teams that drive overall success.
The Community Building Potential of … Malls?!
There we were, skipping and laughing ironically through Kitchener-Waterloo’s largest mall. My grad school roommate and current awesome friend, Jim, and I were hilariously lampooning the community building potential of malls by drawing a clear counterpoint to how they are…
Five Characteristics of the New Economy
Building the next economy will take a movement. Community builders, educators, economists, urbanists, policymakers, business leaders, cooperators, activists, parents, kids, neighbours, and even a few celebrities must unite to build a better normal through societal recovery. Something that we are…
The Cooperative Talent Cloud
The War for Talent is over. Talent won (and is still winning). The way we work is experiencing a significant shift. The conventional notion of a multi-decade career with one employer is being replaced by short-term, dynamic engagements that workers…
Three Ways to Bring the Cooperative Enterprise Model to Non-Cooperative Places
The Great Resignation is causing an existential awakening throughout the world of work because “the dramatic upheaval of the past year and a half, along with the looming specter of death, likely inspired many to rethink how they spend their…
How Agile Methodology and the Co-operative Model Complement Each Other
Earlier this year I took part in two different learning experiences. The first was some pretty standard classroom training that introduced Agile Methodology to employees at Vancity. The second was not standard because I traveled to Bologna in the Emilia-Romagna…
How the Economics of Friendship Shape Work and Life
Friendship is a fundamental and universal human need. This form of social connection cultivates mutual affection, trust, interdependence, and joy. According to one of modern social science’s longest ongoing studies, the social connections of friendship enrich and even extend our…
12 Things that Make Co-operative Leaders Different
Co-operatives are democratic, highly adaptable and very resilient. In my opinion, the world needs more co-opetition from its leaders – when we compete to make society better then we’re all winning. Leading as a member of a co-operative requires different…
What Needs to be in Your Next Corporate Retreat
According to the Internet, most corporate retreats suck. After all, many senior leaders aren’t even great at running effective meetings, so why would a group of us be awesome at designing and delivering what is essentially a multi-day million dollar…
Empathy is Harder than Math
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It involves perceiving and connecting with their emotions, fostering understanding, and often responding with compassion and support. Mathematics is the language of patterns and relationships in the world. It’s…