Business
Bruce Waltuck shared the work he’s doing with Freethinc... for a Change. He holds three decades of experience from real-life settings and academia, which he spent improving business processes, teaching business courses, and being active in the U.S. Department of Labor. Bruce discussed methods social entrepreneurs can use to build an efficient and inclusive process for a social venture. Time spent in the federal sector was a monumental piece of Bruce’s later efforts in managing business processes. While working alongside notable names from the federal sector, Bruce emphasized that his role made home focus more on “helping other people get better results together.” He explains why he was able to carry out the innovative approaches he accomplished, despite working in a sector that usually places strict limits around what is implemented. Bruce was able to transfer these principles into entrepreneurship where working in a strong team towards an aim is part of a daily practice. He gave questions that help people to figure out the impact and measure the effectiveness of the approaches to creating impact. Bruce Waltuck mentioned one particular qualitative method of research called ethnography, best thought of as “narrative inquiry”. In this method, the focus is to get people’s stories. Collecting feedback from people telling their personal perspective provides insight you may not come across otherwise. Bruce went further to discuss defining impact, showing impact, and the complexity of merging and considering perceptions outside of our own narratives. Being able to see out and include other narratives becomes a powerful tool in developing new ways to experiment with creating an impact. Gathering perspectives is one layer, and then comes the layer of being able to translate what you learn into metrics. Finding which metrics work within a certain setting and approach will likely take more group effort. There’s also a personal effort of making sure we each release our own bias to have a real dialogue with others. Bruce said one way to go about doing this is to see if we can “learn to suspend our judgment in the moment of listening and of observing.” Understanding the ways we can connect perspectives leads to better identifying the infrastructure of the social venture we start. Bruce spoke about valuing the process of measuring an initiative’s feasibility, which comes alongside gathering insight from different perspectives. He presented a way for business to write a business plan that helps outline the developments required in forming an initiative. Bruce expressed that entrepreneurship is more so related to a collective rather than the social efforts being done solo. He shared his thoughts on working as a collective, and revealed realizations he received from teaching his students. Bruce described his current aim is to “help people better understand what the real nature is of these social ventures that they're intending to engage in, and what they can learn that will help them be more effective in organizing, leading, and operating and impacting.” If you would like to learn more, you can visit his website freethinc.com. Read Full Transcript Adam: [00:00:00] Welcome to People Helping People, the podcast to inspire greater social change and give you ideas on how to take action. I'm your host, Adam Morris. Today, our guest on the podcast is Bruce Waltuck, founder of Freethinc For a Change. He's also a professor at Kean University where he teaches entrepreneurship and marketing communication. He's got a unique master's degree in complexity, chaos, and creativity, and a long, fascinating career at the department of labor where he co-created the Department of Labor is award-winning process improvement system. Now through Bruce is able to help others entrepreneurs with his 30 years of experience as a leader in collaborative dialogue and business process improvement. So let's jump right in. Bruce,