Archives

My father worked at Concord Group Insurance Company for 36 years. But his fantasy job? Making Shaker furniture. He knew, though, it would be tough to support a very big family that way. These days, the idea of sticking it out at one company for three-and-a-half decades is the exception, not the rule. Businesses re-locate, jobs change...

One study found that half of working Americans would consider changing their career, nearly 25 percent are planning to make a career change in the next 12 months, and only three percent of working adults say they are satisfied with their current job. For those who have always wanted to try something different, this story is for you.

Word of Mouth host Virginia Prescottt spoke with Brian Kurth, founder of the company VocationVacations. He connects people with mentors in the fields they’ve dreamed of pursuing and lets them try it for a spell. She also spoke with David Ryan, who quit a career in international banking to open Beyond Dog Training in Rye, NH.

Visit the VocationVacations website

What's Your Dream Job? You Tell Us!

(Photo by Thomas Berg)

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's newest book is called Unaccustomed Earth. The title comes from a quote by Nathanial Hawthorne -- it refers to how one must till new soil to grow new life. The foreign soil here is New England, where Jhumpa Lahiri was planted. But her family - and her characters - are rooted in Bengali Culture.

Jhumpa picks up the themes from her 1999 collection Interpreter of Maladies, and her first novel The Namesake. These are stories of outsiders; children isolated from their school mates by strange customs and food, parents marooned from the communities that raised them.

Most of her new stories are populated by immigrant parents and their American-born children, mostly living in New England. They are discovering America while losing home.

Word of Mouth host Virginia Prescott speaks with Jhumpa Lahiri about the writer's life and work.

Read an excerpt from Unaccustomed Earth

The social entrepreneur is a special breed, using skills and instinct to catalyze social change, instead of just making a bundle - guided by vision, and what some call insanity. Nobel Prize winner Mohammad Yunus sparked small economies with micro-lending. Wangari Maathi led a movement to plant 15 million trees (she's now on course to plant one billion).

The drive for such unconventional projects is not to dole out charity, but to radically restructure markets - tapping into the economic potential and leadership that has long been at the bottom of the global pyramid.

George Bernard Shaw once said "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Some of today's entrepreneurs are decidedly unreasonable, and have even been called crazy.

Pamela Hartigan is the co-author, with John Elkington, of "The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World." She joined Word of Mouth host Virginia Prescott to discuss the rambunctious individuals who are upsetting the applecart.

(Photo by Gregory J. Smith)