ASU+GSV Summit 2021: J.D. LaRock on entrepreneurship as a career pathway

NFTE is expanding its entrepreneurship programming beyond youth and including community college students and adult learners.
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The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurs (NFTE) has a long history of inspiring youth in low-income communities to embrace entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship education—a model that starts by identifying a student’s passions and builds from there—is among the most effective ways to help students match with postsecondary and career paths that truly resonate, says J.D. LaRock, president and CEO of NFTE.

The organization has expanded its programming to include postsecondary students at community colleges and adult learners. The current college roster includes the College of St. Petersburg, College of Southern Nevada, and El Camino College.

“The focus of all three of those partnerships will be the same to work with, in this case, community college students and adults who are in those communities to learn about what all NFTE students learn about. How to take a business idea that they may have, and really research it, grow it, put a business plan around it, and ideally, even launch a business out of it,” says LaRock.

It’s of significance that entrepreneurship is a pathway for people who are rethinking their futures in response to the pandemic, notes LaRock.

Click here to learn more about NFTE.

WorkingNation—a collaborating partner of the ASU+GSV Summit—caught up with LaRock in San Diego as part of our #WorkingNationOverheard social media series.

Hear from more innovators in education and tech in the public, private, and nonprofit spheres attending the ASU+GSV Summit 2021 here.

Follow the conversation on social media: #asugsvsummit #workingnationoverheard

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.