HeyJaredSterling Insights
Sterling Insights by Joe Sterling offers perspective on motivations, meanings, methods, and movements to grow innovation ecosystems and improve public health and safety, build community wealth, and increase justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
- Latest publication
- Sep 24, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 9, 2026
Latest issues
Who Would You Copy? (opens the original)
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“We know who the innovation role models are, but around here, it’s like being in a crab tank. Anyone who looks like they are climbing out gets pulled back down. If you succeed you become the competitor I have to climb over, especially if you are from a different family network. That’s an old pattern here, and it isn’t helping us build the trust we need for our community to improve.”<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!np1T!,f_auto,q_auto:good
The Last Person Who Knew (opens the original)
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“Marge, our bookkeeper, can never retire. She’s been here thirty-five years and if she goes there won’t be anyone who understands how to work with our vendors. Besides, she knows where all the skeletons are buried.” The manager telling me this works at an anchor employer here in north central Washington. Of Marge’s longtime colleague, the head of maintenance, she said, “John just retired. The general manager keeps having to bring him back for days at a time because he’s the only one who knows wh
The Fire, the Fever, and the Thing With No Ending (opens the original)
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Every kind of challenge I have helped a community work through has had a shape. It started somewhere you could point to. It got worse, then it got better, and there came a day when somebody could say out loud that the thing was over. The challenge arriving now has none of that. No beginning anyone can name, no middle where the worst of it is a slog, no end to plan toward. I have come to think the missing shape is the whole problem, because every method I know was built for challenges you can map
Bill Gates on leading ahead of the AI turbulence (opens the original)
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I’m taking a break from my weekly essay rhythm to develop a new series about the attributes of innovation ecosystems and how AI is changing them. Innovation ecosystems are places where whole communities hold the window of opportunity open for the new. Where leaders encourage that and the culture makes it “just the way we do things around here.” AI is rewriting key elements of what I built an innovation ecosystem practice around. We’ll get to that, but first, why bother? Why innovate in the first
Care, Love, and Kindness Innovates Faster (opens the original)
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“Look after each other.” This is not something you expect to hear from a group of entrepreneurs, academics, and government officials from a Canadian province whose prosperity comes out of the ground. They were seventy Albertans attending a Rainforest Strategies Innovation Immersion, and they had been asked to finish a simple sentence: “If we could improve X, that would be great for the Alberta region because Y.” Among many improvements named that morning, looking after each other was the last to
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