Dive into the archives.
- WKI: Minding the Reluctant Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is as old as time. Its rules of engagement are as culturally embedded as Monday Night Football. For late-comers to entrepreneurship, our municipalities sponsor public entrepreneurship centers, our universities sponsor executive MBAs, and mini-MBAs or “boot camps” proliferate both as private enterprise and through grass-root outreach. The Working Knowledge Initiative approaches entrepreneurship under a [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: Entrepreneurship is Making Use of Reciprocity
A question from a client who’d worked in the non-profit sector throughout her professional life got me to thinking. She was adamant that entrepreneurship meant exploitation. And committed to community building, she was concerned that personal gain meant diminution of the common good. On reflection, what she’d left out was reciprocity. The only way that [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: The Midlife “NO!”
The first hurdle facing consideration of independent employment for the midlife professional is internal. Its that assertive inner voice that says, “Hey—I’m 45, 50, 55, 60 years old. If I were a risk-taking entrepreneur, I would have been doing it years ago. I wouldn’t have worked the way I’ve worked, throughout my work life.” The [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative. Exercise I for Reluctant Entrepreneurs.
“How do I begin to consider even thinking about the Working Knowledge Initiative? How do I begin to wrap my head around an idea like that?” Beginning to consider a life transition to entrepreneurship is a big hurdle. Most of us never consider that we spend much of our lives doing accounting (paying bills, managing [...]
- Speaking Prose All Along…..
There’s that old story about the fella who discovers that he’s been speaking prose his entire life. That’s what I thought, suddenly, listening to the recently self-employed gentleman, despairing of his recent downsizing. I call him self-employed, though he would not yet admit it: because he’s now on his own. He’s smarting because the conditions [...]
- The Real Shift in Middle Age Development
The current economic climate in the United States serves as a catalyst for a shift in the normative developmental tasks of middle age. The popular twentieth century pattern of career leading to retirement has ended. Partly obscured within the spiraling numbers of unemployed workers of all ages, is the high incidence of professional knowledge workers, [...]
