My thoughts for today appear as a guest post on the website of Deb Mills-Scofield [link to her site]. I am honoured to present my thoughts to her many readers!
Some history: I began collaborating with Deb in my work on the IE Brown Executive MBA, an innovative program created by IE Business School and Brown University to combine business acumen and the liberal arts to transform the learning experiences of executives. In her role as Visiting Scholar at Brown University, Deb has contributed greatly to our work to develop entrepreneurial-minded leaders. From this spark, our collaboration has continued to grow.
There are many reasons why you might consider following Deb (@dscofield) on Twitter. She has her own consultancy focussed on helping organisations establish a path for growth that creates actionable, adaptable, measurable and profitable innovation-based strategic plans. In her “spare time”, Deb mentors entrepreneurs in NE Ohio and at Brown University’s Entrepreneurship Program, Brown’s Women’s Launch Pad Program and Brown Students’ startups. She is also on the Advisory Council for the School of Engineering at Brown. She teaches Business Model Innovation at Oberlin College and mentors students applying for Oberlin’s Entrepreneurship Fellowship.
She also has taught at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School of Business, CWRU’s Weatherhead School of Management and Vanderbilt University. She’s an Advisory Board Member at CWRU’s think
When Deb asked me to post a guest blog, I thought about some very insightful words she wrote for HBR toward the end of last year in a post titled “Hope Is A Strategy (Well, Sort Of)”: “Hope is a critical part of achieving a strategy when based on what is possible; perhaps not highly probable, but possible. Hope is the belief that something is possible and probable, and the recognition that the degree of each is not necessarily equal.”
Those words, and that article, motivated me to add my own thoughts about the critical role of hope and aspiration in getting to next. My new post, on her site, is titled “Nextsensing: Aspire and Ye Shall Find”. Read on.