Cross Pollination

Today we have special guest and author Jim Knight, a Training & Development veteran for 30+ years.  Jim has facilitated on a variety of interactive topics, including sessions on organizational culture, world-class service, employee branding & engagement, performance management, philanthropy, leadership and facilitation training.Jim’s recent book, Culture That Rocks, focuses on his 21 years of work with the Hard Rock Café brand and lessons he learned along the way as he helped build their renowned workplace culture. He eventually became  the  head  of  the  School  of  Hard  Rocks,  running  point  on  all  training  & development functions for Hard Rock International.  Jim is also the founder of Knight Speaker and People Forward.

Today we have special guest Bruce Tulgan, bestselling author of It's Okay to Be the Boss, Not Everyone Gets a Trophy and his most recent book, Bridging the Soft Skills Gap, joining us for our 20th episode. Bruce is internationally recognized as the leading expert on young people in the workplace and one of the leading experts on leadership and management. Bruce has worked with tens of thousands of leaders and managers in hundreds of organizations ranging from Aetna to Wal-Mart; from the Army to the YMCA.  Bruce was named by Management Today as one of the few contemporary figures to stand out as a “management guru.” Bruce also lectures at the Yale Graduate School of Management and writes articles for many different associations including TRAINING magazine and the Huffington Post.  Before founding his company, RainmakerThinking in 1993, Bruce practiced law at the Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn.

As a dynamic consultant, coach, and educator, Sarah Scala has over 15 years of experience in supporting organization development, leadership, and change management for diverse organizations. She is passionate about creating solutions that strengthen interpersonal skills and support change with individuals, teams, and organizations.We met when Sarah was giving a presentation on “Sustaining Success through Mindfulness, Optimism, Resilience and Grit.”  I was especially interested around the topic of resilience and grit and how Millennials fit into the equation.  Do we have resilience and grit as a generation?  Most older generations would argue that these core elements are lacking in this generation?  Can we build grit and resilience?  

Dan Schawbel is the Founder of WorkplaceTrends.com, a research and advisory membership service for forward-thinking HR professionals, as well as the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and consulting firm. Dan is the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success (St. Martin’s Press) and the #1 international bestselling book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future (Kaplan Publishing), which combined have been translated into 15 languages. Dan is a columnist at both TIME and FORBES, and has been featured in over 1,000 media outlets, such as “The Today Show” on NBC, “Street Signs” on CNBC, “The Nightly Business Report” on PBS, “The Willis Report” on Fox Business, “Fox & Friends” on Fox News, NPR, People Magazine, The Economist and Wired Magazine. He’s spoken at Google, NBC Universal, McGraw-Hill, Oracle, Harvard Business School, MIT, Time Warner, IBM, and CitiGroup. Dan was named to the Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30 List in

Today we are broadcasting live from the 15th Annual SHRM Vermont State Conference.  This year the conference is titled, HRevolution: Change Tomorrow Today.  What better way to talk about changing tomorrow today then to discuss the young, game-changing professionals themselves, the Millennials.  I’ll be presenting at this conference shortly after the podcast at 3pm, but I also noticed another group of individuals presenting on Millennials with a unique twist – and this obviously peaked my interest!  The two women I have joining me for XPollination are Jessica Sabick of Vermont Energy Investment Corp. and Lindsey Lathrop-Ryan of Change the Story VT, and both have just finished their presentation on Attracting and Retaining Millennial Women to Your Company. We'll take a deeper dive into their presentation and the topic of Millennial women.