Editor’s note: “Attached is a link to a short video about Towards Employment. Towards Employment empowers individuals to achieve and maintain self-sufficiency through employment and focus on helping low-income and disadvantaged individuals to remove employment barriers and assist them along a career pathway. They understand that one job can change a life, stabilize a family, strengthen an industry, and can send positive change throughout an entire community. They are making a difference in thousands of lives. Please watch this video and share it with your community.”

Editor’s Note: I’m not much of a biography guy but this one reads like fiction. Through 400 pages, O’Clery does a great job with short punchy chapters about a man I’d never hear of before. Chuck Feeney quietly built a multi-billion dollar empire of Duty Free stores and then even more quietly invested all of his fortune in social change. He patterned his life after Andrew Carnegie’s essay on “Wealth” which dealt with “giving while living.” No matter where your point of view ends up on the man or his works, it’s just a helluva read.

Editor’s note: Nostalgia. Nothing puts a lump in your throat and a pang in your heart like remembering the past, and this song’s powerful message of

Editor's note:  Creating Innovators offers an expose on what it takes to foster creative and entrepreneurial skills in students and adults alike.  I agreed with Tony Wagner’s general premise that being an 'innovator' is not a destination, but a lifelong learning process.  Through a collection of interviews with students, parents, and their teachers, Wagner identifies a few common threads: parenting styles, impact and role of mentors and teachers, and the role of the various educational institutions on their development (listed in order of importance, in my opinion).

The program director at an entrepreneurial class I taught recently said, “no one speaks to us so frankly about failure.” I then had fun with a colleague discussing that thought and it made me decide to postpone the second of three “Dear Reader” blogs regarding “empty abundance.”

Your responses to my request in last month’s blog for input on my book are astounding.

Editor's Note: We have a team in the process of launching a promising start-up social enterprise called America Mentors (dba Cleveland Mentors), designed to significantly increase the size and quality of student mentoring programs. The team is using The Lean Startup to build an innovative business model that, through effective marketing and enabling technology, will match 5M caring and committed citizens across the country to the 5M low-income/first-generation college students to double their graduation rates.

Editor’s note: Attached for your viewing is a 12 minute video of a commencement address I gave last week the day after we celebrated the life of my good friend, Jake Sposito. I wrote to you about Jake a few months ago in a blog titled, “This Mortal Coil.” These remarks to 38 entrepreneurs graduating from Goldman Sachs “10,000 Businesses” program here in Cleveland use Jake’s life to share a couple of the most important lessons Jake taught me:

Editor’s note: Sometimes I just like to laugh. This song takes an old theme (“beauty is only skin deep”) and an old sound (doo wop) and combines into something catchy and funny to me. Note: R rating for language. Hope you enjoy.