Building Mentorship Capability from Build-a-Bear Workshop

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Build-A-Bear And Mentoring:

Building Mentorship Capability from Build-A-Bear Workshop

Build-A-Bear’s CEO, Maxine Clark, left her corporate career to follow her own vision. She is the founder of the Build-A-Bear empire and has had much success since starting the company in 1997. Her great success has put her at a perfect position to give back to others. She now serves as a mentor for young entrepreneurs and business students.

We will be interweaving the experiences Maxine Clark used in business throughout her career and how those experiences measure within the Career Stage Model as discussed in Chapter 17. Each of the team members will be discussing one of the four stages of the model in depth with many examples not only from Ms. Clark but other corporations as well. Our overall focus for each stage will be in the discussion of mentoring programs. We will provide examples and professional studies that discuss the differences between a formal mentor program or an informal mentor program. Below are the four stages and the team members that will be presenting each.

• The Establishment Stage (Brandon Witzel)

• The Advancement Stage (Yancy Jimenez)

• The Maintenance Stage (Josh Woods)

Although Maxine Clark had found several avenues of success throughout her career, she would come to a point in her life where that success would plateau and she would need a new adventure in her career. The Maintenance Stage to many is a misnomer in the concept of the career stage. In the Organization Behavior book it discusses this as career growth at a slower rate. It would seem that at this point in Ms. Clark’s career, she would find that new adventure that would take her career and mentorship to a new level in the creation of Build-A-B...

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...ounder - Build-A-Bear Workshop USA. Retrieved April 10, 2014, from http://www.buildabear.com/shopping/contents/content.jsp?catId=100003&id=100003

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Maxine Clark: 'It's time for me to do this' - St. Louis Business Journal. (n.d.). St. Louis Business Journal. Retrieved April 6, 2014, from http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/2013/01/maxine-clark-its-time-for-me-to-do.html?page=all

St. Louis, MO Other: AFWA - Maxine Clark - March 19th, 2014. (n.d.). STLtoday.com. Retrieved April 1, 2014, from http://events.stltoday.com/st_louis_mo/events/show/369427425-afwa-maxine-clark-march-19th-2014

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