I’ve been neglecting this blog for the past few months, so I’m making up for it now, with pictures, links, and more. That first collage is from a stroll through the neighborhood on a pretty fall day here in Santiago. The past few months have been busy! Here are a few snapshots, in no particular order.

I traveled to Iquique to lead a workshop for UnoCrea‘s MEC Universitario on how to formulate a pitch that resonates.

I used similar techniques to map big ideas about energy efficiency at Co-Work.

Marcelo and I enjoyed a gorgeous weekend in the south of Chile, exploring Puerto Varas, Puerto Montt, and the Carretera Austral.

My parents moved to Ghana to serve as business coaches for Stanford’s pioneering SEED program. I invite you to read their blog, which is filled with stories of African businesses, inspiring educators, and their adventures on the road.

I taught a first-year course on Entrepreneurship and Leadership last semester, and we’ve just started a new semester. Now I’m teaching Social Entrepreneurship for the second time. Teaching this course is so much easier with a year of experience under my belt. I feel more ownership over the material and more confident in answering the students’ excellent questions. Here’s how I define Social Entrepreneurship.

I’ve been collecting hearts for my friend Jennifer Massoni Pardini’s Chain Link Heart Project. So far she has collected more than 1600 hearts from 11% of the countries in the world. I know that many of you are reading this from countries that are not yet represented, so I hope you’ll send hearts too. When you start thinking about Jenn’s story, you might start seeing hearts everywhere. Here are a few that I’ve found.

One reason I’ve been so quiet on this blog is that I’m in the process of completely redesigning it. I just finished an online course on Empathy Marketing with Abby Kerr and Tami Smith (which isn’t yet advertised online but is similar in content to this offer) and that has really helped me clarify how I can serve people in this space. Here’s a preview of what it might look like. Design and photo by the fabulous Priscilla Radebach at Recheck.

And since one of my goals is to help independently-minded global citizens build international careers, here are a few fabulous resources on this topic.

– Sebastian Salinas Claro has launched Balloon Chile, a program that brings young professionals from around the world to an impoverished region in the south of Chile, to build new entrepreneurial opportunities together, using the Business Model Canvas and other tools.

– Susan Munroe is the master organizer behind Rios to Rivers. Rios to Rivers brought a group of American students to kayak the Baker River in the deep south of Chile, and a group of Chilean kayakers to kayak the Colorado River. These trips have fostered a multifaceted dialogue about culture, hydropower, and global citizenship. When the American students met with HidroAysén CEO Daniel Fernandez, I had the opportunity to translate the meeting and witness this dialogue in action.

– And last but not least, “Multiculturals have a kind of gymnastic intellectual training…” This article by Yves Doz from INSEAD outlines how multicultural experience can benefit companies, by:

1. Making creative associations and drawing analogies between geographical markets, allowing L’Oreal to develop global products and build global brands while remaining sensitive to local market differences.
2. Interpreting complex knowledge – i.e. tacit, collective and culture-dependent, hence impossible to simply “explain”_ across cultures and contextsan essential skill when marketing products like cosmetics, where much of understanding is tacit and culture-dependent.
3. Anticipating cross-cultural conflicts, and addressing them, something critical to the effectiveness of global teams.
4. Integrating new team members from different cultures into teams that quickly develop their own norms of interaction and a strong “in or out” identity, making joining the team once it has been in existence for a while particularly difficult.
5. Mediating the relationship between global teams, with a high level of cultural diversity among their members, and the senior executives they report to, or their interaction with local subsidiary staff they collaborate with, who are usually monocultural.[more]

This marks the end of this insanely long blog post. Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to!