Joe Gerstandt | keynote speaker, freedom fighter, freak-flag flier

I have clearly not gotten much blogging done this year, but I have been productive in other ways. I have been on the road spreading the good word, and trying to mix things up a bit. One recent highlight was delivering the opening keynote for the HR West conference, where I threw in both a touch of yoga and a bow-tie! Also looking forward to another trip to the SHRM Annual Conference and Expo, where I will be talking about the Future of Diversity and Inclusion, and excited to be on TChat this week talking about authenticity.

I have also been working on a new workshop, and I am now ready to take it on the road.

I have bumped into a lot of managers, HR leaders and CEOs that truly “get it.” They are convinced that Diversity and Inclusion are important issues for their organization…they just don’t know what to do. They understand the value, they simply are not sure how to capture it. A big part of the problem is that Inclusion continues to be a vague, abstract idea inside most organizations; it is commonly understood as an attitude or maybe as the absence of intentional discrimination.

So, I have been working, over the past year, to mine my experience and studies to develop a more tangible model of inclusion, a framework for guiding assessment and intervention, that is both actionable and adaptable. While I will probably never stop tweaking it and fiddling with it, I am now ready to get serious about sharing it.

One of the ways that I am going to share it is through a ½ day workshop, FORWARD!

I already have FORWARD! workshops scheduled for Minneapolis and St. Paul, which are both being hosted by the Minnesota Historical Society, and am working on getting workshops scheduled in Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City and possibly Houston this fall. If you want to help make that happen, let me know…I really need local partners to make these workshops successful, so if you are willing and able to host and/or help spread the word, let me know. I am more than happy to provide some free or discounted consulting or presenting for your organization in return.

Be good to each other.