Three Essential Steps Toward Nature Center DREAM Fulfillment
August 24, 2017 Dr. Cheryl Charles, Executive Director Nature Based Leadership Institute, and I presented a half-day workshop at the Magnolia Summit, the 23rd annual meeting of the Association of Nature Center Administrators. Our workshop: Three Essential Steps Toward Your Center’s DREAM Fulfillment. Twenty-six nature center directors from 18 states and Mexico participated. We posted […]
Steve’s Foolish Weather Dare
The Write Launch recently posted an essay chronicling a rather daring bike ride from my Ohio days: https://thewritelaunch.com/2017/07/steves-foolish-weather-dare/. The lessons I learned apply to much of living, learning, serving, and leading. My concluding remarks from the essay: “A towering thunderstorm reminds me that I am of little consequence. And that same storm instructs me that […]
Brief Return to Alabama
I drove the 640 miles from West Virginia to visit my Alabama home Saturday, August 19, seven full weeks since I had departed. Normally, by three weeks into August, summer has taken its toll. Browning road medians and some fading tree and shrub foliage. Lawns that are yellow, no longer lush as they were early […]
Stasis Does Not Exist in Nature; Nothing is Permanent
I carved out Sunday afternoon time to visit nearby Valley Falls State Park, August 6. The Tygart River Falls, flush with abundant July Rains, provided a great setting to begin and end my four miles through the more-than-century-old second growth forest. The Park’s 1,145-acres once supported a community dependent upon the site’s lumber and grist […]
August 2, 2018 One-Month Reflections
I spoke last Wednesday evening to the 300 folks gathered at the University’s Falcon Center. I include it as a GBH Blog to provide a sense of what GBH can do with a deep dive into any entity… perhaps yours. My Condensed Remarks Such a pleasure for me to speak at the 64th Annual Dinner […]
Karen Jacobs Cook’s GBH Photo
The younger of my Mom’s two brothers had two daughters, Karen Sue and Debbie. Karen is a year older than I. Life took all of us in different directions. Decades had passed since we last communicated. Early this past spring, Karen and I found each other on LinkedIn. I had no clue that Karen had […]
Football Season Already!
It’s August! Still summer, yet I’m preparing remarks to welcome new and returning football players and coaches to campus for the August 5, first official day of fall practice. My remarks, while crafted specifically to this purpose, fit any enterprise. Although I will not preach my full-throated Nature-Inspired sermon to the team, I could easily […]
Looking Ahead to 2018
Don’t get me wrong — I am fully and positively engaged in my Fairmont State University journey, flourishing and reveling in the experience. Great people, a wonderful place, and an unrivaled cause. I count my blessings each and every day. Yet I must be ever-unconscious that this pleasant northern West Virginia passage is finite. July […]
An Ecosystems Approach to My Interim Presidency
My approach to learning and evaluating, and then developing recommendations for any enterprise varies little from how I would have assessed (and then managed) a wooded property when I practiced forestry. I have been retained as Interim President to learn, evaluate, and make recommendations here at Fairmont State University (FSU). A Broad Overview and Context […]
Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading: now available
Steve’s Second Book is Available! I am announcing my new book, the second in a series breaking fertile ground in the business and enterprise management and leadership field, and in the arena of Nature enthusiasm/appreciation and applied ecology. Now president of my fourth university and founder of the Nature Based Leadership Institute, I do […]
Four New Killdeer Residents — Deep Lessons from our Partnership with Nature
May 20, 2017, we noticed a six-inch diameter dimple in the round elevated bed (where we had planted one of our backyard specimen trees — a Japanese maple — earlier in the spring) 15 feet from the patio. We wondered what bird had taken the time to make its mark… and why? The next day […]
Posted Interview of the Author of Nature Based Leadership
I am thrilled — bookscover2cover just posted an interview with me: https://bookscover2cover.com/author-interviews/. Open the link and click my photo for the interview. Sandy Fluck, the site’s creator (with Justine Fluck’s incomparable technical support), performs magic in asking the right questions to draw me into explaining and describing the essence of my first book, Nature Based […]