Career Lessons from Comedians
These days I’m on a real podcasting kick. One of my favourites is the Nerdist, which is moderated by comedian Chris Hardwick. Hardwick has all sorts of guests, but some of the most interesting are his fellow comics. During the hour long shows, comics such as Steve...
Four Tips For Asking Great Questions
Asking good questions is an important quality of a friend, a partner and a co-worker. It’s also particularly helpful in a work setting. Whether you are meeting with colleagues or attending your monthly board meeting, asking good and insightful questions without fear...
Five Community Building Lessons From Football Supporters
As a partner in a Vancouver Whitecaps FC movement called Curva Collective, I know a thing or two about creating a positive atmosphere through collaboration. Whether you call it “football” or “soccer” (I will call it the F-word), being a member of any sporting...
Thriving in an Employer’s Market
As it turns out, the recession is effecting the global economy, which, consequently, is negatively impacting the Canadian economy. Shocking, I know. And you heard it here first, from The Potentiality. "What's that? Oh, everyone already knows this? Um, okay, we'll have...
Mentorship Builds Community
We here at The Gumboot are all about planning for the future. For some of us this means canning food - according to The Globe and Mail, this is being done by "hipsters" more than anyone else (in fact, we have a canning-hipster on our staff). For others "planning for...
Harvard and The Gumboot: More than 10 Global Trends to Watch
About a month ago, an up-and-coming business magazine, the Harvard Business Review, released an article called "The 10 Trends You Have To Watch." The article is penned by Eric Beinhocker, a Senior Fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute, and also had some help from...
Strength in Community
Sometime back in Classical Greece someone carved “know thyself” on my least favourite god, Apollo’s, temple at Delphi. No one really knows who wrote it, but a quick twitblog of the interscape will tell you that Socrates (or maybe Plato) took credit for the idea. And Alexander Pope wrote a poem about it a few years later. The point is, before you look outward and certainly before you strive out on a life path – career, family, adventures in foreign lands, kidlets, part-altering-operations – you need to look inside and, well, get a sense of yourself.
Online Communities – Managing your Personal Brand
Do you twit-blog the interscape? Do you or your organization distribute information through the comprehensive and amazing medium of an "online blog website"? Do you have an account on the new social networking tool Bookface? Perhaps you employ these mediums as a means...
When Work Effects My Community
When you get busy at work its really easy to turn in on yourself, and your interests and ignore the outside community. Sometimes, I find this happening to myself. These days, I have a full time job along with a new contract and a new volunteer gig. I'm excited about...
The Classroom Community – times be changin’
First thing's first. It's called "A Vision of Students Today." Have fun with it! I'll see you in 4 minutes and 44 seconds. Here's the video.Did you have fun? Let's move on...Education (elementary, secondary, post-secondary) is terribly hierarchical. Authoritarian,...
community and the classroom
This all (more or less) happened at Bishop's University. A few days ago I let my two favourite undergraduate professors know about The Gumboot. Their responses were different and hilarious. One said there was "too much piratology" and struggled to comprehend why West...
The Engaging Workplace
Believe it or not, people, most Canadians spends more time at (or on the way to/from) work than at home with family. It's not just the actual 35 or 37.5 or 40 or 70 hours at work with colleagues to think about, either. There's also the commuting (some of you out there...