Tag Archives: Work

62 Top Startup Accelerators in the US, Canada & Beyond

28 Thursday Feb 2013

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I’ve been working on a fascinating research project exploring the models and emerging industry verticals of startup accelerators around the world. The standard formula for accelerators is as follows: you bring your entrepreneurial spirit and an idea, and in exchange for an equity stake in your nascent company, you receive some seed capital and a 3 month program providing mentorship, training, advice and resources to help you build your business. The program ends in an Investor Demo Day, where you get a chance to gain the interest of VC and angel investors.

I’ll post something with a synthesis of my thinking around these alternate avenues to value creation soon. In the meantime, I wanted to share the roundup of some of the top tech-focused accelerators, as well as a list of some emerging industry verticals.

Thanks to those in the Next Edge community & on Quora who helped compile this info!

Enjoy!

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What Could the Future of Work Look Like?

01 Thursday Nov 2012

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What are the changing patterns of work? What are the shifts in perspective and attitude? What do the organization and worker of the future look like?

I’ve been mulling on these questions recently, and wanted to invite a dialogue about it. Below is a synthesis of ideas from a number of reports and articles (references at bottom of post) to get a sense of where we’re at in this narrative and where we might be headed.

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On Memes, Manifestos & Movements: A Reflection from CULTUREcon

19 Wednesday Sep 2012

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Last week was spent in Philadelphia and Boston, attending the Agile CULTUREcon organized by André Dhondt and Dan Mezick of the Agile community.

Dan materialized in my twitter feed earlier this year, having noticed my interest in exploring the edges of _<insert discipline here>__, and has been generously exposing me to people and events focused on shaping the future of work.

He gave me the opportunity to participate in a Core Protocols BOOTCAMP back in February, an event led by Jim & Michele McCarthy, authors of Software for your Head. This led to an invitation by the McCarthys to spend a week with them in an immersive personal/business development experience. These were both eye-opening opportunities to understand more about the power of coming into personal alignment, in being able to be explicit about intentions, and generally to become more effective in communicating with others and taking ideas to action. (if you want an overview of the McCarthys’ work, here’s a video interview I did with them last month).

Between then and now, he’s introduced me to Dave Logan of Tribal Leadership (blog post about his 5 Stages of Tribal Culture here), Traci Fenton of Worldblu, Eric Raymond of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Doug Kirkpatrick of the Self-Management Institute, and a handful of others that I got to spend time with in person last week.

So thank you Dan for bringing me up to speed on the who’s who of the future of work!

Now, on to CULTUREcon….. Continue reading →

CultureCon Contest: What Culture Hacks are Transforming Your Workplace?

04 Tuesday Sep 2012

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With only a week until the Culture Conference in Boston, I want to offer up two free tickets to those with inspiring stories about how they are shifting the dynamics of their workplace.

The theme for CultureCon this year is “Freedom at Work.”

It’s based on the notion that we are transitioning into a world of work that values autonomy, flexibility, agility, creativity, and collaborative play.

At the event, we’ll be learning various concepts, tools and techniques (read: culture hacks) that are designed to upgrade company culture into an environment that nurtures happiness and well-being, raises engagement, generates innovation, and develops more productivity and freedom at work.

If you’ve been busy hacking the culture of your organization and want to share your results, submit your story to emergentbydesign at gmail dot com.

We’ll pick the winners by this Friday, September 7, get you a complimentary ticket to the Boston event, and post your story here on EBD next week.

Looking forward to hearing how the changemakers on the ground are liberating the workplace!

For more information about the speakers and format of the event, click here.

If you can’t make it to the Boston event Sept 14, consider coming to the one in Philadelphia on Sept 12!

Culture Hacking & Workplace Innovation

28 Tuesday Aug 2012

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Here’s an interview with Jim and Michele McCarthy, authors of the book Software for Your Head: Core Protocols for Creating and Maintaining Shared Vision.

If you’d like to meet the McCarthys and learn how to hack workplace culture, join us at the Culture Conference in Philly or Boston this September.

For more on the CultureCon event, click here. <Enter the discount code CULTUREHACKING to receive $10 bucks off when you register.>

See you there!

Agile CultureCon 2012: Call for Speakers! Let’s Hack Culture!

19 Tuesday Jun 2012

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found on pinterest via 1000 cultural

A few days ago I posted about CultureCon (Philly 9/12 and Boston 9/14), an upcoming event hosted by Agile Boston that’s focused on culture analysis, design and implementation in the workplace. The objective of the conference is to “bring to more popular awareness how culture is the gating factor in satisfaction, productivity and learning at work.” Continue reading →

Building the Future of Work and Culture: Announcing CultureCon 2012!

15 Friday Jun 2012

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my doodle!

I’ve been a solo artist working independently for several years now, occasionally teaming up with others around events or short-term media projects. Lately though, I’ve become less interested in just doing one-off collaborations. For one, it gets lonely, and secondly, I’m unable to take on the scale of projects I want to work on all by myself.

I want to be part of a tribe — a creative community of like-minds with whom I can learn, grow, and deliver awesome value to the world, together.

This tribe has a certain kind of culture, based in clearly defined shared values that we not only agree upon conceptually, but live and demonstrate through our way of being.

Here are a few characteristics of this tribal culture: Continue reading →

How do we form tribes of greatness?

17 Friday Feb 2012

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I’ve just returned from a two-day workshop sponsored by Agile Boston called The Core Protocols BOOTCAMP. The purpose was to go through an immersive experiential learning process to understand the fundamental mechanics and dynamics of forming GREAT TEAMS. Specifics included:
  • Results-oriented behaviors
  • How to enter a state of shared vision with a team and stay there
  • How to create trust on a team
  • How to stay rational and healthy
  • How to make team decisions effectively
  • How to move quickly and with high quality towards the team’s goals

The course was facilitated by an amazing couple, Jim and Michele McCarthy, authors of the book Software For Your Head.

My Takeaways

The outcome of the past two days is that my focus has been sharpened and honed on some critical components for forming extraordinary teams that can SHIP, scaling, and ultimately impacting epic cultural transformation.

The learning community in which I participate has actually been noodling over this inquiry for several months now, framed something like:

If we were to form a ‘next-gen Agency’ that utilizes swarm intelligence to build solutions, what is the most rapid and elegant way to:

1. Form a team.
2. Envision a product.
3. Agree on how it would be made.
4. Design and build it.

Turns out this is the exact simulation we ran through at BootCamp. Continue reading →

Core Principles for the New Economy: Human Agency & Enlightened Self-Interest

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

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Yesterday Stowe Boyd wrote a commentary (Getting to Trust: Better Swift than Deep) in response to my post about trust and collaboration, saying that the way of the future is connectives, not collectives; cooperation, not collaboration.

He goes on to recommend assembling ourselves with swift trust, align professionally around a common goal/vision/alignment, get short-term projects done, and then disband and move on, verse trying to establish deep trust, which is a much stickier, longer and more political process.

I just want to clarify what it is we’re experimenting with, as Stowe hasn’t been the only person lately who misinterpreted it as attempting to form some kind of unified hivemind. Continue reading →

8 Tools for Self-Analysis: Mapping Your Strengths, Gifts & Roles

03 Thursday Nov 2011

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I’ve always been fascinated with the workings of my own mind, and by human nature in general. With a background doing undergraduate work in Psychology, and graduate work in Social and Critical Theory, I’ve spent long hours contemplating individual motivations as well as group dynamics and the potential for (the much sought after, but often elusive) collective intelligence.If we want to determine what it takes to better function as groups, both in physical proximity and across distributed environments, I think it’s important to understand our own internal landscapes and how our strengths are best amplified in the presence of others with complimentary talents.

Below is a list of online assessments that are useful in becoming more aware of one’s strengths, gifts and temperaments. I’ve pasted excerpts of my own results below, to give a sense of how the assessments are formatted. Continue reading →