Emilie Kormienko

Broadly, the best way to get better at developing strategy: s pend time understanding your market (including your competition); s pend time understanding your customers and their needs; spend time crafting and executing strategies — and learn from those experiences; study colleagues who are great strategic thinkers; read about strategy.

The brilliant Japanese writer Haruki Murakami once wrote, “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.”

Lastly, as you execute on your strategy, in the back of your mind, always be thinking about how you can refine and strengthen the strategy. What would make it better, stronger, and clearer? A good strategy is never static. 

Community programs should focus on creating value and belonging for members, while also creating value and results for the business. A good way to structure and measure your community strategy involves three levels: business, community, and tactical. Each of these will have distinct goals and measures for tracking success.

The most important thing that I think academia has to offer is giving researchers a stable career path to explore long-term questions. I’ve come to appreciate this more after my last phase of work. Working independently was useful to me in earlier stages of research. As public discourse starts to mature, it became more important to have a community... See more

Despite all the public conversations around the metaverse and various hyper-financialized NFT projects, Web3, more than anything, is a fundamentally different approach that some developers have agreed to. It’s based on the premise that there’s an alternative to exploiting users for data to make money — and that instead, building open platforms that... See more

Activate community engagement by doing things that don’t scale, giving members a say in what happens, being funny, sparking debates, being authentic, and keeping your energy high and positive. Lead by example.