Ageism in America - From The Bottom Up?

by Jared on November 28th, 2007

A DC friend of mine was recently featured in the Washington Post about his initiatives to advance the rights of youth in this country.

The basic premise of the article is that youth in this country are sometimes forced into very specific age roles and, as you can imagine, this piqued my interest.

As we’ve seen, particularly with 20-somethings, as the soon as you put someone in a box, they are going to fight to get out. As you can expect, the article brought out some interesting comments from WaPo readers.

Regardless of what you think of him, however, you have to give Alex some serious credit for building an incredible organization. A very insightful 20-something following his dreams and his passion; we should all be so lucky.

Also, to get more information on the National Youth Rights Association - Goto www.youthrights.org

Technorati Tags: Alex Koroknay-Palicz, NYRA, washington post

Four lessons from being 26

by Jared on November 19th, 2007

Right now, I am sitting in a Caribou Coffee in my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia desperately trying to avoid a barrage of calls, e-mails and facebook wall postings about one thing; my birthday.

Ok, “avoid” may be an overstatement. Ok, I’ll admit that as I was writing this post, I checked my facebook wall at least three times.

It’s not that I don’t like my birthday, it just always seems to come at the most annoying times. Grad school has tempered my expectations of just about everything now-a-days.

For instance, I could be doing a lot of things today but the act that is bringing me the most pleasure is the completion of a marketing research focus group analysis. As long as I am procrastinating however, let’s see if I can’t ping out a couple of the things I learned when I was 26….Click Here To Read More >>

Technorati Tags: birthdays

Objective Evangelism – Owen & Net Impact

by Jared on November 2nd, 2007

I am re-posting this from my b-school blog because I think it’s really relevant to 20SM - check out the entire Net Impact Coverage site if you are interesting in learning more.

Today, I got the chance to interview Carol Cone, Chairman of a consulting firm specializing in socially and environmentally responsible brand marketing. Carol was a trip to talk to and I have to admit that, because my curiosity got the best of me, I never got to a single question I originally intended to ask her.

Instead, I dove into the guts of what it means to be socially and environmentally responsible in business. She talked a lot about authenticity and how it’s probably the single most important factor in winning over the current 20-something generation.

At Owen, we tend to rely on that same kind of authenticity in order to differentiate ourselves in the MBA marketplace. For instance; we not only have an honor code, we practice it each day at places like the 8:10 Café where the cash register is open and you are relied upon to make your own change. We also have OwenBloggers.com, a student-run web site that evangelizes the virtues of attending Owen while still maintaining our right to disagree when we feel its right.

What Carol talked about and what I’ve seen in just over three months here at Owen syncs together, perfectly. It’s the same side of the same coin no matter how many times you toss it.

The reason I bring this up now is that walking around Owen as an insider during Net Impact, you can’t help but imagine a spunky, short-legged dog bounding around with a humongous bone proudly clenched in its teeth.

In case you didn’t know, we are the smallest school to ever pull off Net Impact and the fact that its being done so in full view of the largest crowd in attendance for this event is astounding. Perhaps it was a case of “biting of more than you could” at the time but I can’t help but see people like the design team and think; “where else but Owen?”

For those of you who may be visiting “our Tennessee home” and will depart in a couple of days to go back to your own MBA programs, think about what you saw, read and learned here.

The last thing I have to say is that Carol was right, you can’t fake authenticity. Also, thanks for visiting Owen and being a part of our story.

Technorati Tags: Owen, Vanderbilt