Leadership & Innovation for Everyone = LIFE
Everyone can benefit from adding leadership and innovation skills to their life toolkit.
At Grinnell College’s Wilson Center for Innovation and Leadership, we want to help you understand key traits of leaders and innovators, practice critical skills, recognize your aptitude and embrace challenges, and help reveal common traits between leadership, innovation, and a liberal arts education. To do this, the Wilson Center invites successful leaders and innovators to provide instruction and mentorship to our community at key events in our LIFE Series.
Upcoming Events
The Art of Building Consensus
A workshop for students on February 12, 2026
Jose Cerecedo Lopez leads a 1-hour, lunchtime workshop for students on February 12 (Register here). The same activity for faculty and staff is planned during Community Friday on February 13. Registration is requested for both events for accurate meal planning.
Description: In every leadership role and in every organization and many classrooms, we eventually have to navigate through competing ideas. Ultimately, you must move forward together! In this workshop, we’ll use a short-term task to practice how to build consensus. Based on established best practices, participants will learn a structured, multi-round, guided dialogue to build a consensus definition of Ethical Entrepreneurship or Entrepreneurial Thinking.
Workshop instructor Jose Cerecedo Lopez is an Assistant Professor at Elon University, where he teaches undergraduate and MBA courses in strategy and entrepreneurship. His research explores the intersections of entrepreneurship, strategy, and organizational theory, including decision-making.
Past Events
This is a selection of recent events. You can also look back on all past LIFE talk titles and workshop topics.
“Everything Is a Win When the Goal Is Experience!” and “The Plan Is That There Is No Plan.”
A public talk on November 10 and a Tutorial class talk on November 11, 2025.
Mary Zheng ’15, recently a fan favorite on Survivor 48, is a substance abuse counselor, social worker, therapist, artist, and adventurer!
In the public talk, Mary encouraged the audience to be delusional and take a chance! In her life, doing has been better than planning, and she shared her mantra that “Everything is a win when the goal is experience.” She’ll base all these lessons to both her experience on Survivor and the rest of her life. In the Tutorial class talk, she hoped to help first-year students see that they don’t always need to know what they’re doing or where they’re going because sometimes, the plan is that there is no plan. By sharing her experiences during Grinnell and after, she explained that in order to figure out what she wanted in life, she needed to first figure out who she is.
“From Cave Walls to TikTok: The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Storytelling.” A public talk on September 23, 2025.
From the bestselling author of The Hidden Agenda and the mind behind Mastercard’s iconic ‘Priceless’ campaign comes an engaging perspective on the role of emotional intelligence in storytelling. Kevin Allen takes us on a journey from humanity’s first stories painted on cave walls to the split-second narratives that dominate social media today. Drawing on decades of experience in branding, psychology, and narrative design, this talk reveals how empathy, authenticity, and emotional resonance are the timeless forces that drive influence — in classrooms, communities, and culture at large. Walk away with fresh insight into how to craft stories that don’t just inform, but truly connect. This talk was offered through collaboration with the Grinnell Area Chamber of Commerce.
Educational Comics Workshop. April 4-6, 2025.
Gain an introduction to educational comics through discussion of examples, the basics of comics, and storyboarding processes. Practice strategies for visual organization and explore different methods. Have fun and walk out with a working non-digital sketch for your own educational comic. Led by Julia Shangguan ’18.
