902: Empowering the Overlooked - with Eric Glustrom, CEO & Founder, Watson Institute

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to ed up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is your special guest host. I am Dr. Laurie Shanderson, and I'm the host of EdUp Accreditation, but I'm taking some time off today to speak to Eric Glustrom, who is the founder of the Watson Institute and Educate. These are two organizations that transform education worldwide. Thank you so much for joining us today, Eric. I appreciate it.

Eric Glustrom: Thank you, Laurie. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Well, first of all, I'd like for you to share more about the Watson Institute and Educate. And once you do that, then you can tell us about the founding vision behind them both and what inspired you to start the organizations.

Eric Glustrom: Absolutely. I think we can focus especially on Watson Institute today as it's most relevant to the audience of EdUp. It's also my full-time work and focus. I'm on the board of Educate, but grateful that we have an incredible team leading it forward. I moved to the board of Educate in 2013 to get Watson Institute started.

Watson Institute started back in 2013, really at an interesting time in higher education. We started in the same month as organizations like Minerva, as many of the main MOOC providers when Coursera and others were just getting started. All kind of came together right around the same time. It wasn't necessarily intentionally coordinated, but clearly there was something going on in the world of higher ed that led to these disruptions coming into play.

Our initial vision was how do we make higher education everything that it can be? We knew there were many fundamental challenges with higher education. We see that students, as well as employers, do not feel graduates are prepared. Students don't graduate feeling prepared for the workforce and employers say that graduates are not prepared to join their team. Yet the vast majority of provosts out there, the individuals who lead and are responsible for the product of higher education, believe that they are preparing graduates with what they need to succeed afterwards. So there's some sort of fundamental disconnect.

I want to call out that there are a lot of great exceptions, a lot of provosts and higher ed institutions doing really innovative things. And I bet many of the ones that you've had on this show as well. We work closely with Lynn University and want to give a big shout out to their team because they're really pioneering a different kind of education. And we've built an innovative and impactful partnership that's allowed us to do that together.

But there's some sort of fundamental disconnect when the fundamental product of higher education is not serving the needs of the talent marketplace or the users and the payers, the students themselves. And then you couple that with tuition that's increasing significantly faster than inflation and student debt that is also increasing at a rapid clip such that students are graduating with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on average, yet are not equipped to get the kind of jobs that they hope they would achieve as their first career opportunities in their first steps, which of course makes it difficult to pay back the student debt.

But there's a fundamentally deeper issue, which is self-actualization, purpose alignment. The ideal of higher ed is that it's launching individuals on purpose-aligned, self-actualizing journeys. And I think we're pretty far away from that if we look at the system, we look at the outcomes and we look at the financial model. And all of that started to lead to this kind of moment of disruptive innovation in higher education.

So when we started back in 2013, our goal was to really work with universities to change the content, change the structure, change the revenue model, build in partnership with the current institutions, build a new university model in order to help address some of these fundamental issues. We really drove down that strategy for our first six to seven years as an organization, really up until 2019. So from 2013 up until 2019, we built great partnerships with many universities and still work very closely with Lynn University, as I mentioned, where we run a full bachelor's degree in partnership for Lynn University and have seen that program be both incredibly impactful, but also financially sustainable now with Lynn and really is proof that it can be done.

However, the nature of the higher education system is one whereby doing that at scale across many different institutions, we kept seeing over and over again was going to be next to impossible and probably take centuries to do. And I think a lot of individuals in our field, whether it's philanthropists, whether it's students themselves, whether it's leaders of higher education institutions and employers are seeing the same thing. Like why is higher ed itself not addressing some of these fundamental issues with the product and the business model?

And as a result, there's a bit of a new direction that we're helping to pioneer, which the way I look at it is: what does it look like for the corporation to become the new talent development engine of society? Higher education has been the talent development engine of society for centuries. And for most of that time, it's done a decent job with what it needs to do. Obviously that's all come to a head recently. And so now if higher ed is not able to solve these problems themselves, what is the new talent development engine of our society when we need it so critically?

And that's where corporations have this incredible opportunity to step in and fill that gap. Corporations are the buyer, quote unquote, of that talent that's coming out of our talent development systems. And as a result, they have an incentive to develop talent well, because there's a clear ROI for the corporation. And corporations are also feeling the burn and feeling the financial implications of not being able to find the kind of talent that they need given their strategies.

And so you see corporations that are on the forefront. You look at a JP Morgan Chase, you look at Amazon, who are pouring so much money and innovation into developing talent themselves to becoming that new talent development engine. And that shows up in things like corporate partners' investments in groups like Guild to provide education as a benefit for their team members. It shows up in terms of Amazon or Google offering numerous certifications for their employees to really become the talent development engine that they need and they can no longer rely on outsourced sources.

However, what's now missing is really where Watson Institute comes in, which is how do we partner with corporations in order to design tailor-made programs that both identify the talent that they're looking for and then develop that talent with the skills, the experience, the networks that they need to excel within their careers at that corporation and do so in a purpose-aligned and self-actualizing way.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Now, Eric, before you tell us how you do that, because I'm so interested in how you partner and tailor programs, I want to go back to a few things that you said. I was holding on to my comments about this because you've said so many important things and it just reminded me of so many things. First, you talked about the disruption of Watson and the MOOCs, this whole movement and how this was disruption.

You know, I like to think of these, I mean, I guess you could think of them as disruptions, right? Because they're disrupting the status quo. But it really is innovation, right? Or evolution. So nothing stays the same. And I think with the advancement of technology, just overall and how society has moved, it's quite natural. I think that education was going to move too. But I don't think, I mean, I guess someone can say it's disrupting what was there, but I mean, we have to evolve and grow all the time.

You know, the same way I think that the notion of higher education has changed. I mean, when I was much younger, you couldn't talk about going to college to get a job. You went to college to learn, to be prepared, to be able to learn the job once you were on the job. You had to have the ability to grasp the concepts and for the employer to of course invest in you and to train you the way that they think that you need to be trained.

We know that that has changed in the last 20 years significantly. So, and now we're bound by gainful employment stats. What job can you get once you invest in all of this education versus we're teaching you how to be critical thinkers and this type of thinker and you're going to apply that broadly, liberal arts and blah, blah. It's interesting to see. And now we have employees that really are looking for critical needs. So they might not emphasize the entire university or higher ed experience. They want you to have specific skills that lend themselves to adding value to that particular institution. And it sounds like you're working with partners to identify how to get the best out of the students and to making sure that their education is rich enough so that when they do go to the employer, they're of use immediately. And the return on investment for the student is something that you support.

Eric Glustrom: Exactly. Yeah, that's right. And I think it's a good point. It definitely is evolution. It definitely is innovation. You know, I was using disruption in the classic Clayton Christensen disruptive innovation context, which, you know, is another way of saying all industries evolve, right? And, you know, the kind of classic disruptive innovation concept is that a product gets too expensive with too many bells and whistles for what its customers really need. And it creates a market opportunity for a more effective and less expensive solution.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: That's higher ed, isn't it? That's higher ed. More effective, like you just said. Well, tell me about what you do at Watson.

Eric Glustrom: That's right. So, you know, we try to help accelerate that evolution and really partner with corporations to do so. And the way we design and tailor-make programs for corporate partners is based on the kind of talent that they're looking to develop in their priority markets and in their communities. And we have programs that we work with the corporate foundation on, the corporate CSR team on, as well as programs that we work with the corporate talent team on, so on the talent side of the company, specifically in financial services.

And most of our history has been with what we call the Impact Fellowship, which is the program that we run in partnership with corporate foundations and CSR teams to develop talent in their priority markets. And in doing so, it's really uplifting each of the markets in which these, our corporate partners live and work. And then on the talent side of companies are what we call a Career Accelerator Fellowship, partners with corporations in order to identify and then develop talent for their workforce, directly for their workforce. And in doing so, we work to help corporations become that new university to build out the talent development programs themselves that they have not been able to find currently from higher ed.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: So you partner with them when they have an identified need or a deficit of talent in a certain area in their organization, then I guess you provide them with the training to get their employees up to speed. Is that correct?

Eric Glustrom: Exactly. That's right. And the training is tailor-made to the company, but it's not just about training. It's also about training plus mentorship, plus that sense of career purpose and alignment and self-actualization. Our goal is to help the next generation of rising leaders, especially those who maybe haven't had access to traditional higher ed who don't have a four-year degree because it's prohibitively expensive, because it's not the path that they're on. How do we help them to still build purpose-aligned, successful, self-actualizing careers?

Because there's about 90 million adults in the US alone who don't have a full four-year degree. And that's also a very overlooked source of talent for our corporate partners, for their talent teams. They're used to going to colleges, to career fairs to find talent. However, there's this significant opportunity with individuals who don't have that traditional four-year degree, if we can work with corporations to build the talent identification and development programs that serve the corporate's needs, but also identify and support these highly promising rising leaders who may come from that non-traditional background. They have 90 credits. They didn't finish the full 130, 128.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: And you see value in this and what this person can bring to the table. And I guess you kind of help close the circle on the knowledge base based on what the employer needs.

Eric Glustrom: That's right. And right now our employer partners, specifically we're with financial service institutions in Colorado where we're based on the Career Accelerator Fellowship. Specifically right now they don't necessarily know how to access and find those individuals because they're so used to going to college career fairs, et cetera, in order to find their talents. They don't know how to find them, but they also don't know how to develop and support them because they're a bank or they're a company. They do what they do. They aren't a university. They are not this talent development engine.

So, you know, whereas groups like Chase or Amazon and others have poured tons of resources into building internal talent development programs, smaller companies or companies that aren't, you know, on the forefront like a Chase or an Amazon need a lot of help to build out those internal talent development programs. They know it's needed, but they also know that they aren't a university, right? They do what they do as a company. And so we come in as almost a white-labeled third-party provider to help them build into their systems, those talent development programs in order to unlock career opportunities for overlooked talent.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I love that. And I loved how you phrased that for overlooked talent, it means that it's there, we just haven't identified it. I mean, what are some of the most significant impacts that you've observed so far?

Eric Glustrom: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just incredible stories of our alumni going on to both, you know, moving to leadership track positions at top companies, but also building entrepreneurial careers. And, you know, if we kind of focus on the career path side of things, since I think it's most relevant to the EdUp listeners, you know, our alums have gone on to work at leading corporations ranging from Microsoft to LinkedIn to, you know, Comcast and many others and not just, you know, come into the entry-level positions in those companies, but have the skills, have the experience, have the career vision with actually growing leadership track career pathways within those companies and working towards what we talk a lot about, self-actualization, purpose alignment.

Because for us, education shouldn't be and really has never been about just getting a job or just getting a paycheck. That's not what humanity is here for is just that everyone can have any job of some kind. We're here to achieve our fullest potential, both as individuals and as society. And in order for all of us to achieve our fullest potential, we need to be leading career pathways that allow us to self-actualize, that allow us to align with our purpose.

And I think one thing I see in our space a lot is that it's all kind of been boiled down to one number, which is, do they have a paycheck and how much is it? And if they do, then great, that program or that university has been successful. I think that's maybe part of the equation, but it's definitely not the full equation because I don't think any of us for our kids would want to be able to say, yeah, well, they have a paycheck. They aren't necessarily happy. They don't have a clear vision for their career, but they have a paycheck. Like that's not really what our ultimate goal is, right?

And so the goal of education, whether it's being driven by a corporation, whether it's being driven by a university is about achieving our fullest potential as individuals and as society. And so we really focus on that career vision, that purpose alignment, that self-actualization in order to help these individuals who oftentimes are overlooked by the traditional system to achieve their greatest potential, help our companies achieve their fullest potential and looking at society more broadly to do the same across society.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: That is really good, and I should say that in a better way, but you know, it just sounds like there's so much of a human aspect to what you're doing. And it's the complete individual and not just this piece of education, but it's aligning, like you said, with your purpose. And is this the work that fulfills you? Is this the work that you do best? Is this, you know, where you intentionally set your skills to be the best, to contribute the best. And I love that, especially as it relates to entrepreneurial leadership, because I think entrepreneurs are some of the most creative people around and the energy that they have and the ability that they have to just identify a gap and then want to fill that gap. Can you elaborate on the key components of the fellowship and the fellowship programs and why they differ from traditional programs?

Eric Glustrom: Yeah, absolutely. So we have two main fellowship programs. One is the Impact Fellowship. And the Impact Fellowship works with corporate foundations and CSR teams. And the Impact Fellowship is comprised of award-winning training, committed mentorship, a stipend to both help ensure accessibility for the fellows who are participating, but also to help kickstart their entrepreneurial initiatives and ideas and innovations. And then a long-term alumni community. That community is so critical, both during the fellowship, but also beyond.

And it's those pieces put together that we believe create kind of the ideal development opportunity for the rising leaders that we work with in the Impact Fellowship. And then on the Career Accelerator Fellowship, the programmatic elements are similar. There's not necessarily a stipend, but there's a deep focus on training. There's a deep focus on mentorship. And then the difference with the Career Accelerator Fellowship is that these individuals are actually being identified by us and then placed into open positions at our corporate partners into leadership pathway career tracks within our corporate partners and then getting the support along the way.

So the training, the mentorship, the community that we build for the Career Accelerator Fellows all happens after they've been placed at our corporate partners. So it's on-the-job training, it's on-the-job development, it's earning and learning at the exact same time.

And that's really what we talk about when we say, how do we help the corporation become the new university? Is that kind of development should be done simultaneously in an intertwined way as someone is building and growing their career. So as a Career Accelerator Fellowship, when you look across all our alums, 97% are employed or continuing their education or building an entrepreneurial venture.

And then about 67%, one stat that I love to share, are 67% are still in touch with one of their mentors from Watson Institute, even up to 10 years after graduation. So our oldest alums are 10 years out, back from December of 2013. 67% of our alums across all years are still in touch with one of their Watson Institute mentors, which means that these are long-term relationships. If we think about it in our own lives, you know, a mentor who we've been in touch with for 10 plus years, that's someone who's played a big role in our lives, right? It's a meaningful relationship. And those kinds of mentorship relationships are key to the impact that our programs create.

And then just one other stat to share is 99% of our alums, even up to 10 years plus, having graduated 10 years plus ago, use a skill that they learned at Watson Institute in their everyday work. 99% are still using a skill that they learned during their Watson Institute program on a daily basis. I think that's a stat that is critical because a lot of us, when we think back to our higher ed, me included, I had a great higher ed experience, but can't really say I use a skill that I learned in higher ed on a daily basis.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I would agree with you. I'm not even sure if I remember. These are great metrics. I guess you use these metrics or indicators to determine if someone has been successful.

Eric Glustrom: That's right. You know, and there's others too. We look at income is not all we look at, but we look at income. We know that our income stats are not always going to compare with, let's say a coding program that is simply focusing on getting people into high-tech jobs. They're optimizing around income and we are optimizing around purpose alignment and self-actualization and career trajectory.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Right. And so income is something we look at, but it's not everything that we look at. I mean, the self-actualization piece is unique in this higher ed space. You know, relative to that and just trying to educate your partners on the approach that you take, what are some of the biggest challenges you faced in scaling the educational model and sharing it and, you know, articulating the benefit of what you do?

Eric Glustrom: Good question. You know, I feel like the biggest challenges are almost less on the external side and more in just the operationalizing, you know, a scalable program and organization. And we've been fortunate to have just an amazing team and we've built a great culture. And, you know, I feel like I would put the density of talent on our team up against any other organization of our size. And it's incredible to see, you know, and doing all that well is extremely difficult. It takes a lot of time. I feel like it isn't talked about enough. Just the kind of human operation behind growing an impactful program is no small feat.

Give a big shout out to my co-founder and our COO, Andrew Lippi, who does a brilliant job leading a lot of these efforts forward within our organization. But that whole concept of organization building in creating a culture that allows us to scale an impactful program with the talent that we need to do so is extremely difficult. And I'd say that's probably the biggest ongoing challenge, you know, that we're just tackling one step at a time.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: You know, you have a lot of experience. And again, to me, what you do is extremely innovative. And I say that because you don't hear a lot of reference to self-actualization and so much intention on the things that you emphasize. It really seems to be, and I can't think of the phrase right now, very transactional, right? You pick an education, you complete this set of courses, you walk away with this document, and it seems like your approach is extremely intentional relative to the outcomes that you want to provide for the individuals that participate in the fellowships. So just reflecting on your own career up until now, what key learnings or insights have you gained from your experiences? I guess both in Watson and Educate that you believe are crucial for others in the field of educational innovation.

Eric Glustrom: It's a great question. And Laurie, let me just second exactly what you just said. And I could not agree more with the transactional nature of the direction the field is going in. It's really how we're trying to buck the trend. And it all comes down to that what you measure becomes what matters.

And so if all that we're measuring is income, then everything else is going to be optimized around that. And that's what we've seen happen and progress. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just not the complete picture. And so we try to measure a lot more than just income. We measure long-term career achieving their fullest potential. That can't always be boiled down to a number.

However, there are a lot of ways that we're able to get at that self-actualization concept. And am I as a graduate of the program achieving my fullest potential? And that's what we measure and that's what we optimize for. And I think if you ask any of our students, they'd say that is really what matters, even more so than the income or just the paycheck. So we try to get beyond that just purely transactional direction that I think the field is going in. And not to say it's a bad step, it's a really important step, it's just not complete. So I couldn't agree more with you on that front.

To your point about kind of skills or concepts that we've learned along the way, I think the first has to do with systemic change. And ultimately in order to create lasting change, no one organization is going to be the sole driver of changing the entire direction of a generation or changing the entire direction of an industry like education. And so really understanding how to do systemic change effectively is critical because if we change the system, then we've built a sustainable structure that is carrying forward whatever change we're moving forward on its own. It's become sustainable.

And oftentimes it means it's scaled as well, because once the system adopts it, the scaled impact is huge. And so everything we do has that systemic change lens built on top of it, knowing we are never going to be the organization to reach all 90 million non-traditional overlooked talent out there, who are on what you could say non-traditional pathways. How do we shift the system, the employer system, the university system, in order to support that 90 million talent at scale?

Now, in order to shift the system, we need to build the model ourselves. We need to prove the model. And then we need to work collaboratively with the system to integrate it into the system itself. And doing that requires a fair amount of scale and a pretty heavy operational lift. But if that systemic change layer isn't overlaid on top of it, then ultimately we're just going to be a drop in the bucket in terms of the scope and magnitude of the challenges that we're trying to solve.

So having that systems change approach and doing systems change well is a critical skillset and philosophy that I wish more organizations in our field had versus just focusing on how much impact can we create within the walls of our organization. The question is, how can we use the impact that we create within the walls of our organization to inspire the system to do things differently? And that's when scale happens. That's when sustainable change and impact starts to happen. And so that's really core to everything that we do.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Yeah, I love that approach because it moves away from being reactionary. And you talk about scaling sustainability and to build in something that can navigate the dynamic nature of higher ed. And I think that's important. And along those lines, are there any new initiatives or expansions or any trends that you're preparing for?

Eric Glustrom: You know, the Career Accelerator Fellowship is really an ongoing new innovation. That's kind of the big thing that we're focused on is we're taking all the experience that we've built up by working with the corporate foundations and then applying it to be able to work with the talent side of companies to leverage that skillset and that experience to identify, develop talent for the company itself.

It's an exciting new innovation within Watson Institute. And it also adds a lot of value for our corporate partners, but it also allows us to start thinking differently about the system of talent development and really helping the corporations to truly become the new university in a lot of ways. And I'd say that's the big kind of innovation that we're focused on currently.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I love that because it is growing your own and making sure that you are creating the talent that supports the best needs of your organization. So I think it is an investment well worth. It's a very good investment for organizations to make. What advice would you give to emerging social entrepreneurs who aspire to create impactful educational initiatives and add on a global scale? What advice would you say? I mean, you have all this experience, you've done all these things, you've seen all these things. I'm sure you can write a book on your experiences and the impact of those experiences. Just for our listeners, can you share some of the secret sauce?

Eric Glustrom: Though it's a great question. It's something we also talk a lot about with the individuals we work with, with the fellows that we work with, because they're starting on their careers. They're starting on their journeys as well. And one of the biggest things that I like to talk about is timeline. And on what timeline are we making decisions? There's a great quote, I believe it comes from Mark Benioff, which basically says, we as people have a tendency to gravely overestimate what we can do in 10 months, but gravely underestimate what we can do in 10 years.

And the whole idea is that, especially as we're working with rising leaders, the fellows, they're like in 10 months, in a year, everything's going to be changed. Like my situation is going to be revolutionized. Like I'm going to accomplish A, B, and C. And we say, what is your timeline? Are you making decisions to optimize based on one year or are you making decisions to optimize based on the next decade and decades? Because the truth of the matter is we actually underestimate what we can accomplish in 10 years. We may overestimate what we can do in 10 months or a year.

And we see that all the time, but we actually underestimate what we can do in 10 years, if we are committed, if we're focused on a very clear path and a clear direction. And so we really encourage our fellows and I'd say the same for rising leaders who are out there who are working to help contribute to this evolution of higher education and of our talent development systems as society that take the long-term approach, look at the long-term timeline, try to do over the next 10 years, over the next 20 years, because that's where real systems level change can start to happen and sustainable impact can start to happen as well.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: And that's why I'm really seeing the value of your approach relative to the self-actualization piece. When I was in school, I was thinking about tomorrow. I was thinking about when I get this degree, I'm going to do this. I didn't think. And no one slowed me down enough to think about what is it I'm doing? What intention do I have? How will that look? It just was a part of being transactional, very responsive, very knee-jerk, very in the moment and without intention relative to planning or looking at a trajectory long-term, no timeline.

It was just, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, and then I'm gonna do this. How, when, I don't know. I mean, I really appreciate that. And I think that you get employees and individuals that can really provide more value because they understand themselves and their own journeys.

Eric Glustrom: In a huge way. That ROI, there's a clear ROI of that and, you know, of exactly what you're talking about. If you understand your own journey, where you're going, the value you want to add, the value you want to create, the ROI for the company of an individual with that kind of vision is just game-changing. And every single one of our corporate partners sees that on a daily basis and feels that it's just a completely different kind of equation than working with someone without that long-term career path, trajectory and vision.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: All right, do you guys publish any of this, the results from these things? Are they all anecdotally shared someplace or have you put together like some type of repository where the public can really see the impact of what you're doing relative to these stories and these experiences?

Eric Glustrom: Yeah, absolutely. We, a couple things, a lot of our impact is, you know, the kind of key stats are on our website. So a lot of it's published there. We will oftentimes write blog entries as well with kind of the latest impact data and then the last thing I'd say is we're constantly working with our corporate partners to analyze the impact of each fellowship we run with our corporate partners for them and for their internal and external communications.

So we really want to ensure that our corporate partners are also equipped to tell the story because they're the real stars of this show. And so a lot of what we do is to try to put our corporate partners front and center to equip them with the impact data from their fellowship that we're partnering with them on, so that they can share that with their internal teams, start to change the narrative with their internal teams about really seeing that potential firsthand, but also with their external audiences.

So that comes up in press releases that we put out with our corporate partners and blogs that we create for them, as well as things like lunch and learns with their teams, to meet the fellows, to get a sense of what they're doing, of their tremendous potential. And so without throughout all of the kind of external communication that we do, our intentionality is always to put our corporate partners front and center in it because we want to ensure that they're getting the credit for these programs that they're investing in. And that helps set them up to be really the new talent development engine of our society, right? And knowing that that credit is going back to them, they're the ones who truly made it possible.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I mean, I love it. I just want to make sure that it's shared. Of course, it'll be shared on the EdUp podcast now and more. We'll learn about what it is that you do, but it just sounds really, really interesting. And like it can just, you know, it's just a really big thing that needs to be considered more. I never considered in any of my administrative roles, the intentionality relative to the self-actualization, the way that you do.

You know, we want students to have experiential learning. We want them to be civically engaged. We want them to do these things. But I never have been a part of anything that has taken the time to really set the tone to understand that and then to couple that with an educational experience. I think that's amazing that you do that. And as we wrap up here, I have one last question for you and thank you so much for your time today.

You know, your work is driven by the belief that solving humanity's toughest challenges starts with the hearts and the minds of the next generation. And I want to know how do you stay motivated and inspired in your mission?

Eric Glustrom: Great question. And let me just first say, Laurie, thanks for having us on the show. And it means a lot to be able to share our story, but also the impact that we're creating and the potential that we're unleashing through the EdUp podcast and through the EdUp experience specifically.

And, you know, I just, why I love what you all are doing because you're creating this platform for innovations to be shared that will help accelerate the evolution of our space. And so really appreciate you having us on the show.

And, in terms of staying motivated, I learned this from someone I look up to tremendously, but he basically shared that, you know, the longest journey we can make as people is the 12 inches between our head and our heart. And I think really trying to continually ensure that our head and our heart are connected in the work that I'm doing and making sure that my head is fully there and my heart is fully there as well. I think that's where the sweet spot of motivation comes from.

And it's definitely less of a destination and more of a journey because getting to that level of alignment is kind of like the Holy Grail. It's like we may never get there, but it's always something to work towards. And I'd say, you know, what keeps me motivated is always trying to meld and merge and integrate my head and my heart as much as I can in the work that we're doing.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I feel honored to have spoken with you today. And when you see me writing feverishly after you say a phrase, you've given me like five gems that I had to stop and write down just because your words are so powerful and what you're doing is amazing. And I'm so happy that our listeners are gonna have the opportunity to hear more about what you do. Now, if they need to find Watson, where do they go and how do they do that?

Eric Glustrom: Thanks, Laurie. Our website is www.watson.is and there's links to all our socials there as well as more information about the fellowships that we run, the work that we do, the fellows and alumni that we've been fortunate to support. And again, really appreciate you having us on the show.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Well, it's truly been my honor. And there you have it, everyone. You've just been ed-upped. You should tune in to more of the Ed-Up Experience podcast where we talk about, I think, just everything under the higher educational sun. And you should meander your way over to Ed-Up Accreditation. That's where yours truly hosts the Ed-Up Accreditation podcast. Anyway, it's been a pleasure, again. Loved having you on and to our listeners, stay tuned for the next awesome episode.