Guest Speaker, WKU Assistant Professor Mariah Yates, shared a presentation on what business leaders can learn from pop culture during the monthly “Strong Community, Strong Coffee” meeting Thursday.
Yates taught the class “Entrepreneurial Leadership Through the Lens of Taylor Swift,” using her book “Swift Leadership, a Taylor-made Approach to Influence and Decision Making,” as curriculum material. She attended the meeting as a guest speaker to share some of the points from her book to local business owners.
The “Strong Community, Strong Coffee” (SCSC) meetings are put on once a month at the WKU Innovation Campus by “Central Region Ecosystem for Arts and Technology and Entrepreneurship,” or CREATE.
“SCSC is geared towards any start-up businesses or entrepreneurs in the community, everybody is welcome and it’s a free event that we host monthly,” said Brittanie Dawson, business coach for Bowling Green’s Small Business Development Center and host of the event.
Yates tied in many key traits that she believed Swift embodied, as well as practices that she had shown to excel in, such as not giving in to public scrutiny, balancing a work and private life and not striving for perfection.
“One of the things that I admire most when it comes to someone in a leadership position is someone who not just talks about their successes, but someone who will own their mistakes. We’re not looking for leaders to be perfect, we’re just looking for them to be honest,” Yates said.
According to the Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange, some learning objectives Yates brought over from her class were:
- Understand core leadership theories and their practical applications.
- Engage with interdisciplinary methods to explore creativity and innovation.
- Create original projects showcasing leadership and creative strategies.
- Develop skills in critical reflection, discussion, and peer feedback.
- Explore the role of ethics, authenticity, and influence in leadership.
“The themes today are authenticity, creativity, and joy, and how you can use pop culture references to map those onto what you do in your everyday practices,” Yates said.
Yate’s pop-culture approach to improving leadership has had a positive impact on the community, whether it be those who take her class or those who had sat in on her presentation.
Sheena Widler, the owner of Booked and Balanced, a bookkeeping business based in Bowling Green, attended the meeting as a way to network as well as to become a better leader within her own business.
“It’s really cool to talk about a person in pop culture, and being able to take what they’re doing and apply it to your own business, and to think that we’re not that far from where they started,” Wilder said.
