My work with KID Museum demonstrated to me why maker skills are essential for us all to master. Whether you lead teams or look for learning experiences for the kids in your family, you can benefit from understanding maker learning and the skills it is designed to build. KID Museum’s “Mind of a Maker” framework, the foundation of its maker education programs, should be on your radar. Weaving its values of curiosity, collaboration, creativity, and compassion in developing maker and STEM skills, all fused in a sound scaffold of maker programing, KID Museum gets kids excited about learning that they will master and remember.

The Mind of a Maker program development framework is built to ensure kids become empathetic and persistent problem-solvers, teammates, and changemakers. The talents are also critical to their development of any technical skill. The experiences are designed to invoke imagination, reflection, perseverance, skill-building, exploration, initiative, teamwork, and perspective-taking.

Now imagine what you and your organization could accomplish if you had team members with these skills. Suppose you have team members who know how to tackle problems with high technical and high social-emotional skills. Now visualize what challenges you have right now that could be solved. Finally, envision our future world if today’s kids have these skills to solve tomorrow’s problems. Who wouldn’t want to be on a team with creative, imaginative, reflective members who show initiative, persistence, value perspectives, and ultimately have the skills to bring ideas to life?

And yes, everyone can learn these maker skills, and with an open mind, you can even master them at any age. 

As educators, we should all be makers. We should create the breadth and depth of learning experiences that learners will remember for the rest of their lives. I don’t recall the specific grades I obtained on many tests and classes. Still, I remember the experiences that engaged me, sparked my interests, shaped my life goals, and developed my inquisitive and imaginative nature. I wish this for your kids and for those in the area of education in which you serve.  

With this mission, unlike the no-calorie sweeteners in the market, Splenda had to be more than a weight-loss diet product. The marketing strategy for Splenda the consumer product and the ingredient product had to find a way to help people manage behaviors that lead to obesity, adult-onset diabetes, and heart disease. The Splenda campaign had to address one of the hardest things for marketing to do, gain acceptance in a category filled with negative perceptions and get people to change long-term behaviors that have long-term benefits. The Splenda launch strategy had to be about acceptance and influence before the first commercial even ran to help move people from short-term benefits to long-term impact. We needed a community of people and resources to influence this change for Splenda to achieve its mission and market leader goal.

As the Global Group Product Director, my team and I led the launch of Splenda in the US and the relaunch of the brand worldwide. We led with media relations and influencer marketing to medical and nutritional professionals, bringing them in under the tent on Splenda before the launch. This stealth marketing strategy, along with the Splenda product benefit of being made from sugar, helped propel Splenda to the #1 no-calorie sweetener in its third year and became the flagship brand of a new division within J&J, McNeil Nutritionals, for nutritional food and supplement products. Foods and supplements that make a difference in your life.

After Splenda, all the products and services I managed had to have a bigger reason for being in the world. 

2025 Update: Johnson and Johnson gains focus by splitting the company and divesting the consumer products group (Now Kenvue) allowing both to focus on their bigger reason for being in the world. 

In 1970 Walden University found a sweet spot in distance learning to help educators who were ABT (all but dissertation) achieve that final step in obtaining their doctoral degree. These students were professionals with a social impact mission to fix educations most challenging problems in their work, and they didn’t want to stop having an impact to “go back to school.” With Walden, they could finish their dissertation from wherever they were and without stopping work so they could keep moving in their journey. They could keep working and balance obtaining their goals, with work and family.

Fast forward 34 years, Walden became a part of Laureate Education, and a global network of universities, and had expanded its reach to working professionals across many academic areas and all degree levels by shifting all its programs online. Walden became one of the first fully online universities in the US. I was promoted to Executive Vice President of Marketing for Walden and found myself in a classic marketing situation. A scramble for market share in a fast-growing new category where every school was marketing the same category benefits, the convenience of online learning, and not building a unique brand promise to help the right students find us. That is when we led the university in reconnecting with its mission and making it meaningful and competitive in a new context. We moved Walden from being “America’s Premier Online University” to “Walden University, A Higher Degree, A Higher Purpose.”

I am proud that this brand promise is still alive and well with Walden University celebrating 50 years of service to working professionals around the world.

Some people don’t just work. They work to make a difference.

Walden University, a Higher Degree, a Higher Purpose.

Watch the first Walden Brand Ad on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsVuBreiFjY

Torrens collaborated with companies to develop programs with job-related content and provided innovative online formats to exceed student expectations of the Australian “Uni” experience. Building the first new Uni designed for today, required a brand and marketing campaign that brought this to life in all forms. We relied on a clear brand promise delivered through traditional and evolving media forms moving education marketing into digital marketing channels not used by many of its counterparts at the time.

As CMO for Laureate’s Global Products and Services Division, my team was brought in to help jump-start the local launch, while the school focused on opening operations. Within 6 months we built a brand, product and student service strategy that challenged the traditional university marketing approach, focusing on how the school was built and who it was built for. Focusing on the future and what students need today, not the traditions of the past.