Latest news with #ScottTaylor
Zawya
24-05-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Former Navy SEAL and United States (U.S) Congressman Scott Taylor to Speak at African Energy Week (AEW) 2025, Underscoring U.S.-Africa Energy Investments
African Energy Week (AEW) 2025: Invest in African Energies, taking place in Cape Town on September 29-October 3, is proud to announce that Scott Taylor, Former U.S. Congressman, Navy SEAL and Founder of Taylor Global Strategies, will speak at this year's edition of Africa's premier energy event. A strong delegation of U.S. industry leaders are expected at the conference, with the goal of connecting American companies to African energy opportunities and fostering new partnerships across the energy value chain. A former Navy SEAL and U.S. Representative for Virginia's 2nd congressional district (2017–2019), Taylor brings a deep understanding of legislative and security frameworks, having authored and supported laws relating to energy, the workforce and veterans' issues. Prior to his time in Congress, he served in the Virginia House of Delegates and built a career in security consulting and critical infrastructure protection. Taylor's participation at AEW 2025 underscores growing U.S. interest in Africa's energy markets – from Chevron's multi-billion-dollar investments in Angola's offshore assets to the expanding footprint of American LNG and renewables firms across Mozambique, Senegal and Namibia. Through both private enterprise and U.S. government initiatives like Power Africa and Prosper Africa, the U.S. is increasingly positioning itself as a long-term partner in Africa's energy future. Under the Trump administration, a renewed focus on energy dominance could create new avenues for U.S. investment in Africa's oil, gas and critical minerals sectors. Trump's first term emphasized deregulation and the advancement of fossil fuels, coupled with a foreign policy that favored bilateral deals and strategic partnerships over multilateral aid. In the African context, this could translate to stronger backing for U.S. companies pursuing commercial opportunities – particularly in energy infrastructure, LNG and hydrocarbons – while shifting away from climate-focused development finance. 'We will not have an AEW today without the strong support of Scott Taylor. From day one, he showed up and championed US Africa investments when others were in Dubai in 2021. The United States remains a key player in Africa's energy future, and we welcome Scott Taylor to AEW 2025 to share his vision for how the U.S. private sector can partner with African nations to drive investment, innovation and mutually beneficial growth,' states NJ Ayuk, Executive Chairman of the African Energy Chamber. 'Congressman Taylor brings a strategic outlook and deep understanding of U.S. policymaking, which is critical to unlocking capital and forging lasting energy partnerships.' Distributed by APO Group on behalf of African Energy Chamber.
Forbes
28-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Why An Entrepreneurial Mindset Isn't Just For Silicon Valley
An entrepreneurial mindset benefits corporate organizations. When most people hear the term "entrepreneurial," they picture hoodie-wearing tech founders pitching to venture capitalists in San Francisco. But an entrepreneurial mindset—characterized by innovation, resilience, and initiative—has become essential across all sectors and roles. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology demonstrates that entrepreneurial thinking isn't just for startups. This mindset, sometimes called "intrapreneurship" when applied within existing organizations, enables professionals to "recognize and act on opportunities, take calculated risks, and drive innovation" regardless of their role or industry. So, what exactly makes this mindset so valuable beyond Silicon Valley, and how can you cultivate it? Let's explore the fundamentals of this approach and why it matters for professionals in every field. An entrepreneurial mindset isn't necessarily about starting a business—it's about how you approach your work and life. People with entrepreneurial mindsets are self-directed, action-oriented, and deeply engaged in their work. Where others see obstacles, they adopt a growth mindset, viewing each setback as a chance to develop new skills. Three key traits characterize this mindset: An entrepreneurial mindset matters for your career because it: You don't need to quit your job and launch a startup to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. Here are practical ways you can cultivate this thinking pattern in your current role: The relationship between entrepreneurial thinkers and their teams is crucial for success. As Professor Scott Taylor from Babson College notes in his recent research, "The leader-follower dynamic is central to entrepreneurial leadership, with the leader's mindset and emotional intelligence playing a critical role in fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration." Even without formal authority, your entrepreneurial mindset can positively influence your team by: Start building your entrepreneurial mindset today with these practical steps: The entrepreneurial mindset isn't a personality trait you're born with—it's a set of skills and attitudes that anyone can develop. From teachers revolutionizing classroom engagement to nurses improving patient care protocols, professionals across industries are applying entrepreneurial thinking to solve problems and create value. By embracing this mindset, you position yourself to thrive in an increasingly complex, fast-paced work environment where adaptability and innovation are premium skills.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Babson Profs Unveil First Model For Entrepreneurial Leadership
Babson professor Scott Taylor is co-author of a new research study that defines a first-of-its-kind conceptual model for entrepreneurial research. Before Alex Stoddard was a music producer and filmmaker, he was a college basketball player. His coach, he says, modeled a kind of leadership that stuck with him: 'Communication, reflection, and building meaningful relationships that extended beyond the court.' It's a similar philosophy he encountered through 's Entrepreneurial Leadership model, which is embedded across several Babson courses and lessons and is the subject of a new research paper from three Babson professors. The first-of-its-kind conceptual model redefines leadership by focusing on neuroscience, emotional intelligence, and relationships instead of the traditional 'hero' leader approach. It's the first to distinguish entrepreneurial leadership from other theories, showing that effective leaders succeed through collaboration and strong relationships, not just individual drive. Danna Greenberg 'It has deepened my understanding of entrepreneurial leadership by highlighting the importance of thinking outside the box and not being limited by traditional solutions,' says Stoddard, a Class of 2025 Master of Science in Management in Entrepreneurial Leadership candidate at Babson. 'I now more clearly recognize how critical emotional intelligence, conflict management, and deep connection are in driving team effectiveness and authentic leadership.' In January, six Babson professors – including Scott Taylor, Danna Greenberg, and Andrew Corbett – published '' in The International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal. The model explains how leaders and their teams can work together by tapping into motivation to pursue entrepreneurial goals. Co-authors Wendy Murphy, Keith Rollag, and Jeffrey Shay also contributed. It builds upon research in entrepreneurial leadership since 2011. 'It starts from a deep understanding of who you are and an awareness of your team and having your own entrepreneurial mindset,' says Danna Greenberg, the Walter H. Carpenter Professor of Organizational Behavior at Babson. 'And if you do that, you're able to work with your team in a way that motivates them and engages them. It excites them to also be entrepreneurial and, together, you can pursue that opportunity.' The research project really started with Taylor, who spent his sabbatical year combing through everything written on entrepreneurial leadership – across disciplines, theories, and schools of thought. He realized first that most of the existing definitions were focused on the leader – the entrepreneur acting as hero – with little scholarship exploring the relational aspects of leaders and follower. He also noticed glaring omissions. 'There's a lot that's happened in the study of human performance and behavior that integrates neuroscience, psychology, and social psychology that really had not been brought into entrepreneurial leadership research or writing,' says Taylor, an organizational behavior professor and Babson's Arthur M. Blank Endowed Chair for Values-Based Leadership. Scott Taylor Entrepreneurial leadership as a concept isn't necessarily new. But it's often an afterthought, something tacked onto traditional theories of leadership or entrepreneurship, depending on who was doing the writing or the teaching, the authors say. Babson's model aims to fully integrate the two. 'We definitely think about it as a collaborative effort,' says Greenberg. 'An entrepreneurial leader, one of the key ways they differ from a traditional view of an entrepreneur, is they're bringing a team along.' According to the model, entrepreneurial leadership happens when someone with a high degree of emotional and social competence – empathy, self-awareness, adaptability – combines that with an entrepreneurial mindset and uses the relationship with their team to unleash intrinsic motivation. That motivation, in turn, fuels creativity, innovation, and shared risk-taking. The model also incorporates neurological research from Anthony Jack, an experimental psychologist at Case Western Reserve University. Jack's research shows that the two brain networks responsible for analytical problem solving and empathetic thinking can't activate at the same time. When one turns on, the other switches off. 'When you are being analytical, solving problems, focusing your attention, you're activating what's called the task positive network. And when you do that, you're actually suppressing the empathetic cognition, or what's often referred to as the default mode network,' Taylor says. 'That network is critical to self-awareness, moral reasoning, pro-social behavior, openness to others, creativity and innovation.' Entrepreneurial leaders, he argues, have to be skilled at toggling between these two networks. Shenaya (Nay) Martin Johnson A cornerstone of Babson's approach is the belief that these abilities – emotional intelligence, toggling between brain networks, relational awareness – can be taught, not just theorized. 'I don't think we'd come up with any model if we didn't believe it can be learned,' Greenberg says. Babson has launched four new courses using the model. It has also retooled five existing courses such as its signature undergrad . The college is further developing asynchronous modules and building out its master's program in entrepreneurial leadership. The key, Greenberg says, is giving students repeated opportunities to practice moving between the creative and analytical mindsets, and to do so in messy, real-world situations. That includes moments of failure, discomfort, and conflict. 'You have to create real situations where they have to work together over longer periods of time, where they actually make mistakes, and where they have to learn from that mistake,' she says. 'As faculty, we know how to teach them through that. Because you're not going to learn any of this just by reading about it.' Taylor and Greenberg see their new model as not only a Babson signature, but one that other schools use, built upon, and test its results. The complex problems the world faces – the climate crisis, human inequity, geopolitical clashes – require collaborative leadership. 'We don't think the issue is an inability to solve complex problems. We think it's an issue that the leadership models being operationalized aren't sufficient,' Taylor says. Greenberg agrees. 'If it's us teaching it, or if it's other people teaching it, we just need more people out there doing it.' Before Babson, Shenaya 'Nay' Martin Johnson saw leadership as bold action: being brave, taking initiative, and creating change. That mindset drove her to move across the country after college, serve in AmeriCorps, and eventually found her own nonprofit. But it wasn't until Professor Scott Taylor's Entrepreneurial Leadership course that her perspective evolved. 'I realized that effective leadership does not stem solely from bravery or individual action, but from the positive relationships we cultivate and the feedback we receive from others,' says Johnson, a student in the one-year MBA at Babson with a concentration in entrepreneurship. She is also founder of , a global nonprofit support club for mothers, and Moms@Babson, a student organization she launched to build community on campus. As a mother, MBA student, and social worker living with multiple sclerosis, she brings a deeply personal lens to the idea of resilience and relational leadership. The Entrepreneurial Leadership model gives her a framework for rebuilding how she leads teams and projects. She has resigned from jobs where leadership lacked empathy, especially during the traumatic loss of her twins in premature labor. As a leader, she wants to create space for her and her team to grow together. Johnson now applies EL principles across her ventures, including Moms@Babson. Her leadership style emphasizes adaptability, experimentation, and what she calls 'rolling the ball and watching where it goes.' She leads by trusting her instincts, building relationships, and learning along the way. 'You do not have to concentrate on entrepreneurship to become an entrepreneurial leader. Being an entrepreneurial leader is valuable in any industry and position, especially if you have to manage teams,' she says. 'Being an entrepreneurial leader means being open to where the journey or project might lead, even if it isn't exactly what you expected or planned for. Take the risk to make the change and strive to become the leader you wish you had when you needed leadership.' Read the full paper: 'A Conceptual Model of Entrepreneurial Leadership: How Entrepreneurial Leaders Enable Entrepreneurial Opportunity' DON'T MISS: WASHU OLIN BIG IDEABOUNCE WINNER: A SOPHOMORE WHO COLLECTS IDEAS ON HIS IPHONE and EAST MEETS WEST: WILL HUNGARY'S CORVINUS UNIVERSITY BECOME A MAGNET FOR INTERNATIONAL TALENT? The post Babson Profs Unveil First Model For Entrepreneurial Leadership appeared first on Poets&Quants.
CBC
18-04-2025
- Science
- CBC
What the dinosaurs did and more...
How a helpless baby bird protects itself from hungry huntersThere's not a more vulnerable creature in nature than a baby bird. Tiny and immobile, they're easy pickings for predators. But the chicks of the white-necked jacobin hummingbird have evolved a unique defence. They disguise themselves as poisonous caterpillars to discourage those that might eat them. Jay Falk, an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado and Scott Taylor, director of the Mountain Research Station and associate professor at the University of Colorado, studied these birds in Panama. Their research was published in the journal Ecology. Seals have a sense of their oxygen levels, which makes them better diversSeals can dive at length to tremendous depth thanks to some remarkable adaptations, like the ability to collapse their lungs, and radically lower their heart rate. Chris McKnight, a senior research fellow at the University of St Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit in Scotland, led a study looking to see if tweaking oxygen and C02 levels changed the seals' dive times. The researchers discovered that the seals have the unique ability to measure the oxygen levels in their tissues, so they can anticipate when they need to return to the surface before they get into trouble. The research was published in the journal Science. Fruit flies can show a playful sideAs the joke goes, time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. Researchers recently demonstrated that fruit flies enjoy more than just aged produce. Using a custom carousel built to fly scale, scientists found that some, but not all, of their fruit flies would play on it, enjoying an activity that had nothing to do with the necessities of life. This brings up the possibility of variability in personality for fruit flies. Wolf Hütteroth is an associate professor at Northumbria University, Newcastle and was part of the team, whose research was published in the journal Current Biology. Scaring krill with a dose of penguin pooKrill, the small, shrimp-like creatures that swarm the world's oceans and are particularly abundant in southern oceans, play a big role in marine food webs, connecting microscopic organisms with many of the oceans' larger animal species. Researchers in Australia investigated how krill respond to predator cues, like the smell of their feces. Nicole Hellessey, from the University of Tasmania, said the mere whiff of penguin feces affects the Antarctic krills' feeding behaviour and causes them to take frantic evasive action. The study is published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. Fossils tell us what dinosaurs were. How do we know what they did? Dinosaur bones can tell amazing stories about these prehistoric beasts, but how do we piece together how they behaved? A new book dives into the many lines of evidence that can shed light on the behaviour of these extinct creatures. From fossils, to tracks they left behind, to their modern day descendents, paleontologist David Hone from Queen Mary University of London explores how scientists develop robust theories about how dinosaurs lived in his new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know.
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
‘Frankenjet' stealth fighter made from two wrecked warplanes joins US Air Force fleet
The US Air Force calls it the 'Frankenjet,' a stealth fighter stitched together from the parts of two F-35s wrecked in accidents that is now on duty and combat ready. ''Frankenjet'' is fully operational and ready to support the warfighter,' a report from the military's F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) said on Wednesday. The recycled warplane traces its origins to 2014, when an F-35A about to take off on a training mission from Florida's Eglin Air Force Base suffered 'catastrophic engine failure,' according to an Air Force report on the incident. The aircraft, known as AF-27, also sustained major damage to its rear. Pieces of a fractured engine rotor arm 'cut through the engine's fan case, the engine bay, an internal fuel tank, and hydraulic and fuel lines before exiting through the aircraft's upper fuselage,' an investigation concluded. The resulting fire burned the rear two thirds of the fighter jet, it said. Then on June 8, 2020, the nose landing gear on another F-35A, known as AF-211, failed on landing at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, resulting in severe damage to that warplane, according to reports on the incident. So, the Air Force was left with two useable pieces of $75 million fighter jets – the nose of AF-27 and the rear of AF-211. 'Rather than writing off both jets as a loss … teams made a bold decision in 2022 to remove the nose from AF-27 and put it onto AF-211 to maximize savings and add back an operational aircraft to the fleet,' a report from the F-35 JPO said. Scott Taylor, lead mechanical engineer for manufacturer Lockheed Martin, put the effort in perspective in a 2023 news release. 'All of the aircraft sections can be de-mated and re-mated theoretically, but it's just never been done before,' Taylor said. 'This is the first F-35 'Frankin-bird' to date. This is history.' The work was done at Hill AFB, with 'entirely new, unique specialized tooling, fixtures, and equipment,' the 2023 Air Force press release said. Almost two and a half years of repairs paid off in January, when the Frankenjet flew for the first time, from Hill AFB to Lockheed Martin's F-35 facility in Fort Worth, Texas. 'The rebuilt aircraft's first flight was flown to the edges of the performance envelope, and it performed like it was fresh from the initial production line,' Jeffrey Jensen, the F-35A variant lead engineer, said in a press release. Late last month, Frankenjet was flown back to Hill AFB and assigned to the 338th Fighter Wing, the same unit AF-211 had originally belonged to. The military statement put the cost of the Frankenjet project at $11.7 million, saying it saved the Pentagon and taxpayers $63 million over the cost of a new replacement aircraft. The US Air Force has 383 F-35As in its fleet, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The F-35A is one of the three versions of the US military's stealth fighter. The Marine Corps flies the F-35B – a short take-off, vertical landing aircraft – and the Navy flies the F-35C, designed for aircraft carrier operations. F-35s have also become a popular choice for US allies and partners, with 17 other countries either flying or acquiring the jets, according to Lockheed Martin.
