We got a chance to get to know the Cultivator’s new Community Manager when he gave us 30+ minutes to ask him anything we wanted.

As a global leader in eye care, Alcon relies on innovation and collaboration—and to stay on top of the market, the company needs its associates at the top of their games.

Alcon R&D wanted to create a culture that nurtured and grew ideas and talent—but in a global enterprise, top-down initiatives rarely lead to real change. A true community of changemakers needs to be built from the ground up. That’s where Cultivate came in.

Truly listening to employees and their ideas remains a struggle for many large organizations. With so much to do, it can be easy to ignore the insights and ideas that our front-line employees are sitting on, even when we know there can be tremendous opportunity in those insights and ideas.

Before the-year-that-must-not-be-named came to an end, the Cultivators Community hosted a Goal-Setting Workshop.

Welcome to our learning design shop at Cultivate! We recently developed a new program called the Empowered Cultivator Lab. You may have heard about it.

For those of you curious about how we create this sort of thing, here's a behind-the-scenes look.

The beginning of the year is frequently when many of us focus on building new habits and taking new actions. And while we may feel steadfast in our commitments to these new behaviors at the outset, keeping up with them over time can be challenging.

I don’t know about you folks, but I LOVE research, and that’s a good thing because I had a chance to do a lot of it over the past several months as we designed our Community Accelerator program.

At Cultivate, we talk a lot about turning ideas into action—but first, you need that essential spark. And then you need to give that spark the space to turn into a fire. But amid the repetition of day to day life, it can be hard to make space to nourish creative thought.

What sets a true changemaker apart? Action. The trailblazers who create real cultural change don't wait to be asked for their opinions. Instead, they take decisive action based on their convictions.

Recently, I was inspired by a fellow Cultivator, Clemens Wan, who writes Lists of 30s for breakfast. When he told me he was going to write a list of 30 ways to grow a virtual community, I made a calendar reminder to follow up with him about it in two weeks. He had it published in less than 24 hours.

I don't know how to play chess, but that hasn't stopped me from watching The Queen's Gambit twice. When Benny gets salty with Beth for not coming to New York City, he says something profound: Maybe is a loser’s word, Beth.

Internal communities, in their simplest form, are organizational support systems. There can be multiple types of internal communities within one organization, and they can have varying degrees of formality or structure.

When I learned how to design for a better over-all human-centered experience, I became more aware of the barriers and challenges people face when interacting with various products. Over time, I noticed my visual impairments and began focusing on creating more accessible products across the board. It proved that designing with everyone in mind coincidentally makes an attractive product for all to use.

While growing up, my family moved a lot. That meant attending new schools, making new friends, and establishing new routines. At age six, my parents moved our family from Mexico to the United States.

Ah, LinkedIn. It’s a noisy place: the one-line hooks like “he walked into a meeting and wrecked the culture” prompting you to see more, the low production smartphone videos about how to do sales better, and the posts that are “better” fit for Facebook.

Recently, we put Cultivator Jesse Dondero in the hot seat and allowed the Cultivators Community to ask him anything. It got pretty scandalous. Just kidding. But, we learned a lot.

Last week, we asked our team to share their favorite podcast episodes, hoping to learn a little more about our diverse interests and what makes us tick.

Today, we’re sitting down Community Manager Melissa Thi Le of the Cultivators Community, a community where voices are heard, solutions are shared, and changemakers around the world can mobilize for change.

We all have ideas—but too few of us turn them into reality. In an organizational setting, that can translate to billions of dollars in missed opportunities. And for a company like Novartis, it can mean missed opportunities to save lives.

At Cultivate, we know that innovators need both a roadmap and organizational support to bring their ideas to life. That’s why we created our Advance Your Idea platform, an interactive learning curriculum designed to help people generate, advance, and make their ideas happen.

I used to live for the 'essential' checklists that promise to get you a CEO-worthy routine or turn you into the most interesting person at a dinner party―but I never follow through on them.