Category Archives: X-Culture Stories
HOW I READ 50 BOOKS PER YEAR BY SPENDING 0 (zero) EXTRA MINUTES ON READING
Confession: I am an audio book addict. I listen to books all the time: when I bike, drive, in the gym, mow grass, clean my house, do laundry, repairs my house, jog, cook, take shower, and even swim. In fact, I can’t do some things without an audio book. E.g., my bike won’t move until…
The X-Culture Global Symposium and the U.S. Visas
As we are getting ready for the X-Culture Symposium in Miami in July, one issue we have to deal with is the U.S. visa. Out of hundreds of applicants, we eventually narrowed our roster to 150 top-notch students from 54 countries. Most either did not need a U.S. visa or easily obtained one. However, some…
You can’t step in the same (Facebook) River Twice
Following up on my earlier post on X-Culture’s experiences with Facebook (10 Things I’ve Learned About Facebook), here is another lesson we learned through trial and error. As noted earlier, some of our posts turned out to be widely popular. The first major hit was a series of Entrepreneurfail.com cartoons posted on December 12, 2015. In…
Hell Week
The Navy SEAL “Hell Week” is the third week of the famously grueling BUD/S training. The official description reads, “Hell Week tests physical endurance, mental toughness, teamwork, attitude, and your ability to perform work under high physical and mental stress, and sleep deprivation.” It is a perfect description of the last week of each X-Culture…
A student story
Just saw J.T. Hinson, one of our former X-Culture participants. He participated in the competition last year. His story is very inspiring. His team still stays in touch and communicates on a regular basis. After his team won the X-Culture Competition, his employer was so impressed with J.T.’s work that he offered to pay J.T.’s…
Webinars: Our Experience and Remaining Challenges
Recorded video presentations and live webinars are an indispensable tool in a project like X-Culture. Over these years, we’ve experimental with about a dozen platforms, such as WebEx, Zoom, BlackBoard Elluminate, Skype Pro, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, Adobe Connect, and more. After much testing, we settled for
X-Culture Conference and Networking Event
Wow! It was great! We’ll do it every semester from now on. But let me start from the beginning. So, for a long time, I wanted to provide my students with an opportunity to present their reports at the end of the X-Culture project. Unfortunately, I have 150+ every semester, each on a different team….
10 things I’ve learned (and 3 things I still don’t know) after X-Culture’s 2 years and 87K followers on Facebook
More X-Culture blog posts A company Facebook page could be a great tool for promoting your business, building a community, and getting useful input from your followers. But managing it could be quite challenging, and frustrating at times. Yesterday was exactly two years since I’ve created the X-Culture page. We now have 87,000 followers…
Full Circle: Former Students Now Professors
What a pleasant surprise. I have just received a letter from a student who participated in X-Culture in 2010. Our very first cohort. She writes, “Dear Dr. Taras, … I’m contacting you because of the great experienced I had in X-Culture as a student. I’m now a professor at Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara. I would…
Need Your Advice on Regional Representatives
One of the issues we’ve been struggling with for some time is regional representatives. It has become especially salient since we launched X-Culture Kids – and we seek your advice. At the first glance, X-Culture does not need regional representatives. Our very simple recruitment strategy has worked very well. The number of applications has been…