Values, Vision & Entrepreneurial Leadership: Ten Days of Free “Lessons”

Welcome to a Series on How to Think About Your Professional Journey

A few years ago a terminally ill friend of mine was asked to teach a class at an online university for their business program. She was unable to physically do it, and she knew she had little time left, so she asked me if I would do do it so she could spend her time on other things.

While I was willing to do it just to help her, I thought first before I said yes. I have worked across sectors in a variety of industries. I’ve written speeches where many a time we include the refrain, “they didn’t teach you this in business school but….” The whole point of me teaching this, I thought, would be to share insights from the school of hard knocks. I have worked with many many leaders, I’ve been an officer at a Fortune 500 company, started my own company, co-founded a charity that has to date raised and donated over $2 million to breast cancer, and my company works with many leads on their visions and values. I’ve worked with countless entrepreneurs.

So why not bring this real-world perspective into the classroom?

Recently, I was reading back on some of the material I developed and decided to share it in a series of short pieces. This is the first of ten short pieces I’ll be sharing.

First a little background on what you’ll be reading and how it came to be.

Developing this on-line course was the first time I ever did something like this and I have to say, it was a challenge. The school had already advertised the course title but I had to develop the entire syllabus and all the content. They told me that each week there should be a reading assignment and a powerpoint presentation that students could review.

Entering the World of On-Line Learning

I felt really challenged as I developed the materials. I’d never taught a class before where I didn’t have a chance to actually talk…. and I found it quite challenging to put together a powerpoint presentation that didn’t do all the work for the students. I kept running into the same problem — if I recapped what I wanted them to get from the reading assignments, where was their incentive to actually read?

As I struggled with those powerpoints and the start date quickly approached, I finally thought up a solution. For each week, I created a short thought piece on what I would have said had I been teaching the class in person. I tried to provide a perspective from “real life” and a point of view of the topic at hand.

The articles in this series sprang from those thought pieces and I’ve even added one that I felt was missing the first time around. Some of them are 98% the way I used them in the course and some of have evolved. The hypothesis in the course, and why I agreed to develop it, was that there is an inextricable connection between vision, values and leadership. In this case, they were interested specifically in entrepreneurial leadership which we cover more at the end of the lessons.

Here is what they will cover. Here are the nine lessons that I hope will prompt you to think about your own values, how to craft or consider a vision and how you will ultimately lead. I will be posting one each day for the next 9 days.

1. Intention & Possibility Frame Your Values
2. Seismic Shifts & Truth Tellers
3. “I Can See Clearly Now:” Thinking of Work as a Calling
4. Shaping the Edges… Starting With Yourself
5. The Business of Vision & a Clear Value Proposition
6. Why You Need a Value Proposition
7. Just Plain Cake
8. You Don’t Have to Start Something to Be an Entrepreneur
9. Leading Through Ideas

These “lessons” are thought starters. They are not intended to provide the answers. Instead, I hope they prompt you to do some important thinking and then pursue further learning.

I hope you enjoy them and are inspired to follow your path, the path that begins with who you already are, what you want to spend your precious time thinking about and doing, and the legacy you want to leave. It might take you weeks to figure it out, it might take you years, or it might unfold over decades. It doesn’t actually matter how long it takes. It’s only that you do it.

We are, no matter how much or how little time we are given, on this earth to live our big lives. This series shares the things I think about as I live mine, and as I work with leaders and organizations to live theirs.

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Jane Melvin is the founder and president of Strategic Innovations Group, Inc., a strategy and creativity consulting practice. She created the course syllabus and all of the “white paper” content for this class.

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You can also find Jane on Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Jane-Melvin-3

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