How do you teach entrepreneurship to high school students?

by Rocco Tarasi

How do you teach entrepreneurship to high school juniors? In only one hour?

I had the privilege this summer of speaking for an hour to students at the Neighborhood Academy, a college prep school in Pittsburgh for low-income students, about being an entrepreneur. “Being an entrepreneur” is certainly a broad topic, and you could choose to focus on a number of different areas. I decided that I would have three goals: make it simple, make it inspiring, and make it practical.

How To Give A Great Speech

Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford University has been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube. Five years after he delivered it, a text version still flies around the Web. The speech is as powerful for its message--stay hungry, stay foolish--as it is for its structure and delivery. "Today I want to tell you three stories from my life," says Jobs. "That's it. No big deal. Just three stories." And with that, viewers (and readers) are hooked.

Future public speakers of the world, take note. You don't have to be a Silicon Valley billionaire to deliver a great speech. The best speeches include a clear, relevant message and a few great stories to illustrate it.

The Four Capacities Every Great Leader Needs

By Tony Schwartz @HBR

When I was a very young journalist, full of bravado and barely concealed insecurity, Ed Kosner, editor of Newsweek, hired me to do a job I wasn't sure I was capable of doing. Thrown into deep water, I had no choice but to swim. But I also knew he wouldn't let me drown. His confidence buoyed me.

Some years later, I was hired away by Arthur Gelb, the managing editor of the New York Times. This time, I was seduced by Gelb's contagious exuberance about being part of a noble fraternity committed to putting out the world's greatest newspaper.

Over the last dozen years, I've worked with scores of CEOs and senior executives to help them build more engaged, high performance cultures by energizing their employees. Along the way, I've landed on four key capacities that show up, to one degree or another, in the most inspiring leaders I've met.

5 leadership lessons from Mac OS X Lion launch

Steve Jobs headed up another seemingly successful Apple product launch Wednesday, taking to the stage in Cupertino to announce a revamped MacBook Air and updated operating system. Jobs and the other Apple bigwigs not only rolled out a few drool-worthy products, they also offered a more subtle lesson in business leadership.

Fast Company pinpointed five leadership lessons doled out at the Back to the Mac event that business-minded folks can take home. (A cheaper take home than a $1499 MacBook Air, no doubt.)

• Adapt. Take note of what works with one product line and apply it to your other product lines.
• Rethink. Don’t straight up copy “what works” within your product line.
• Stand strong. Don’t follow trends blindly and hold your ground on things of value to your customers.
• Understand. Read between the lines of what you’re really selling.
• Sparkle. Add a touch of pizazz.

Full Story at FastCompany

How to motivate your employees

By Misty Belardo

For those of us who are employed, we know there are things that motivate us to work and really give our best to the company we work for. I am just lucky I guess that I love my work. I also love the things my company has given me in terms of training and benefits which go along with working there for almost 3 years now.

For our readers who are employers, or who are considering starting their own business, there are some things you need to consider in order to achieve a good volume of work and productivity from your employees. Maybe you think that the employees you currently have are a problem, or hard headed. Maybe you should consider that they just need a nudge or need to be motivated.

I found a video that I hope can help you. This video discusses some valuable steps that can truly help you motivate your employees:

Step 1: Motivate 'YOU' first

Step 2: Get to know your employees

Step 3: Use smarter goals

Step 4: Delegate authority

Step 5: Work out a reward system

Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

If you want to be really good at something, it's going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, along with frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures. That's true as long as you want to continue to improve, or even maintain a high level of excellence. The reward is that being really good at something you've earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying.

Here, are the six keys to achieving excellence that have been found most effectives:

• Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
• Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4½ hours a day.
• Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
• Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
• Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

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Game Changers

by Mike Myatt at Blogging Innovation

At one time or another all great leaders experience something that is so big, so impactful, that it literally changes the landscape. It’s what I call a “Game Changer.” A game changer is that ah-ha moment that creates an extreme, disruptive advantage or improvement. What’s interesting is that the best leaders proactively focus on looking for game changers. Sure, great leaders never lose sight of their core business, they pay attention to managing risk, etc., but they spend far more energy intentionally searching for opportunity, but not just any opportunity – a game changer. In the text that follows I’ll not only provide you with a blue print for finding game changers, but I’ll also ask you to share your experiences and insights as well. I hope this post is a game changer for you…

As most of you know, I spent last week at the World Business Forum in New York. I listened to esteemed business school professors, two Nobel laureates, bestselling authors, and some of the world’s most successful CEOs. These were all people who have personally experienced game changers, and some have experienced them many times over.

While there were clearly a few moments last week that I found instructionally valuable in terms of creating a game changer (Nando Parrado), there weren’t nearly enough of them. There was far too much rehashing of old ideas spun as new. A game changer doesn’t maintain the status quo, it shatters it. It was this taste of disappointment that led me to share my personal process for finding and implementing game changers – I call it SMARTS (Simple-Meaningful-Actionable-Relational-Transformational-Scalable).

The Nine Rules of Innovation

by Braden Kelley:

Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.

I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.

Here are the nine innovation roles:

Top 10 Speakers at the World Business Forum 2010

by Mike Myatt

The video above recaps the final day of this year’s World Business Forum in New York. In yesterday’s recap of Day one, I gave a detailed breakdown of each speaker presentation, but today I thought I’d do something a bit different…Since everyone seems to like a list, I decided to rank the top ten speakers from both days. So the list that follows is my ranking of the Top 10 Speakers from World Business Forum 2010 as well as my logic behind the rankings.

1. Nando Parrado- Nando was the only speaker at the conference to receive a standing ovation, but this is not why I ranked him #1. Nando earned the top spot on the list because his presentation simply raised the bar to an entirely different level. He recounted the miracle of surviving 72 days after his plane crashed high in the Andes. After being unconscious for 3 days and being counted among the dead by other survivors, Nando awoke to find his mother, sister and a number of his rugby teammates had died. They had no food, water or winter clothing. At an elevation above 12,000 feet and with temperatures that reached -35 below zero, Nando not only survived the initial crash, but a broken skull, being buried by a subsequent avalanche, eating the flesh of the dead, and then hiking for 11 days covering 70 miles across the Andes in street clothes to get help. This was one of the longest human survival accounts in history and was later made into the book Miracle in the Andes and then into the movie Alive. As a result of Nando’s efforts 16 people were rescued after 72 days in the Andes. Nando is an exceptional human being whose philosophy can be boiled down into two of the quotes given in his presentation: “I fought so hard for life that I decided to have a life” & “life is success.” Nando’s presentation simply put things into perspective for a world sorely lacking perspective. Bravo Nando…

The Leaders talk on Day 1 of the World Business Forum 2010

By Mike Myatt

I had several requests for a detailed breakdown of my observations on the first day of the World Business Forum – careful what you wish for. Day one of the conference was headlined by a highly esteemed group of speakers who didn’t give me nearly what I had hoped for – While there were a few shining stars, and some great sound bites, I wasn’t challenged nearly as much as I hoped to be. There was a lot more common thinking than critical, innovative thinking. I have live video above, and in the text that follows I’ll share my opinions on the best and the worst of WBF Day 1…

Students: You may not be Mark Zuckerburg, so stay in school!

By Vivek Wadhwa, Guest writer at TechCrunch

Instead of another boring lecture, last week my students at UC-Berkeley got quite a treat: a lively discussion with TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington. I once described Mike as a cross between Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern; so I was ready for a little controversy. But he ended up lighting such a big fire, that I’ve been bombarded with questions from students about their education and careers. The questions aren’t just coming from Berkeley; after the discussion was posted on TechCrunch, students at Duke asked me to discuss this at a keynote I am giving at their entrepreneurship symposium on Wednesday; and students at other schools, from as far as India and Singapore, have asked for advice.  So I’ll just respond here in the hope of quenching this fire.

Five Communication Tips for Leaders

by Mike Myatt

Regardless of your station in life, both what you say, and how you say it matter…It matters to an even greater degree for those in positions of leadership. Leaders simply don’t have the luxury of choosing their words in cavalier fashion. Whether in written or oral form your vocabulary matters. Few things make an impact, or lack thereof, like the words you allow to flow from your lips or from your keyboard. Even when you think they don’t, people really are listening to what you say, reading what you write, and making important decisions about you based upon your choice of words.

Do not make the mistake of taking the importance of communication for granted – communication matters. Put simply, the ability to effectively communicate with others is often the difference between success and failure. Don’t be fooled into thinking your title, education, influence, or charisma can take the place of sound communication skills. While the aforementioned characteristics certainly won’t hurt, they can be quickly eroded and/or undermined by making poor choices in the words you use.