Presidential Searches and Personal Rolodexes

"I had a fascinating discussion not long ago with a consultant friend of mine about the relative value of expertise versus connections. We were serving the same client — he was helping the institution carry out a strategic plan and I was supporting its presidential search. The issue had arisen during a search-committee meeting as we boiled down the standard, walk-on-water job description to the four or five essential attributes and competencies on which that hiring decision would be based. It was then that the question of the breadth and quality of the candidate's personal contacts pretty quickly shot to near the top of the priority list. The committee clearly wanted someone who had a robust 'Rolodex,' especially when it came to potential financial supporters of the institution. . ."

Presidential Resources

The Presidential Speech Archive and the American President Multimedia Gallery are excellent presidential resources.

The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500

"The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of 'Generation F' – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy. If your company hopes to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, it will need to understand these Internet-derived expectations, and then reinvent its management practices accordingly. Sure, it’s a buyer’s market for talent right now, but that won’t always be the case—and in the future, any company that lacks a vital core of Gen F employees will soon find itself stuck in the mud."

American President Multimedia Gallery

"Indepth information reviewed by prominent scholars on each president and administration"

Presidential Speech Archive

"The Scripps Library, through cooperation with various presidential libraries, has been collecting some of the most important presidential speeches in American history. These speeches all have transcripts, and some are available in their entirety in full audio. Recently we have expanded our collection to include video speeches from President John F. Kennedy through President Barack Obama."

Research: Employees Treated with Dignity Perform Better

"Managers can get much better performance when they treat team members with honesty, kindness, dignity and respect, U.S. researchers found."

Article on Talleyrand

"He is one of history’s great survivors— and opportunists. Born into the high aristocracy, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838) was by 34 a worldly, womanizing bishop. With the overthrow of the ancien régime, he adjusted to the new realities and embraced the revolution, rising fast and high in the new order even though it meant his excommunication. He fled the Terror, first to England and then to America. But Citizen Talleyrand soon returned, ingratiating himself with the Directoire and slithering into the remunerative post of foreign minister. . ."

Alexander Hamilton, Modern America’s Founding Father

". . .The other Founders were Americans of a century’s standing, who fought the Revolution to defend liberties their families had claimed for generations. Washington and Jefferson, landed grandees, descended from seventeenth-century Virginians; Harvard-educated John Adams’s forebears settled in Massachusetts Bay in 1638. Such men were rooted Americans, living on land inherited from their fathers. Hamilton, by contrast, was a penniless immigrant from the West Indies; like so many New Yorkers, he had come here from elsewhere, seeking his fortune."

The Best CEOs You Don't Know

"Few businesses are really thriving in this rough, tough economic time. Those led by remarkable chief executives who are proving themselves trustworthy--and maybe worth investing in too. Will you recognize the names below? Probably not, but that's just because it's usually the bad guys who make the headlines. . . ."

Free Online Handbook on Educational Technology

To help get colleges thinking about how they might adapt their teaching styles to the new ways students absorb and process information, Mr. Siemens and Peter Tittenberger, director of the center, have created a Web-based guide, called the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning.

Yes, CEOs Should Facebook And Twitter

"Social networking has clearly reached a tipping point. Sites like MySpace and Facebook boast hundreds of millions of members. Barack Obama's presidential victory demonstrated that platforms like YouTube and Twitter could transform electoral politics. Yet in corporations where such tools have been expected to bring profound transformations, there has been strong resistance to change. . . ."

Community College Surge

"A survey released Tuesday here at a meeting of the League for Innovation in the Community College suggests that the early anecdotal reports of increased enrollment are in fact correct. Further, community colleges are reporting increases in just about every major type of program they offer -- with notable increases online."

College Study Finds Two-Year 'Penalty'

"A study being released today shows that people with a bachelor's degree who transferred from a community college earn less than those who start at a four-year school."

Web Dictionary Plans to Outdo Print Cousins

"The revolutionary new dictionary Wordnik, set to go online this week, provides the curious logophile with all these features and more, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Harnessing the native capabilities of the Internet, Wordnik definitions include images scraped from Flickr, audio recordings of pronunciations, and ratings of definitions by other users. The project includes 4 billion words and offers sample sentences plucked at random from the web."

2008 National Survey of Student Engagement

"Findings from a national survey released this week show that the quality of
undergraduate education varies far more within colleges and universities than between
them. As a result, rankings can be highly misleading predictors of educational quality.
Analyses of key “Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice” reveal that in almost
every case, more than 90 percent of the variation in undergraduate education quality
occurs within institutions, not between them. A related conclusion is that even
institutions with high benchmark scores have an appreciable share of students whose
undergraduate experience is average at best."
Actual Survey Results Site

Study Shows First-Time Online Donors Often Do Not Return

"People who go online to donate to charity for the first time often do not return to the Internet to make later gifts, according to a new study examining the experience of 24 nonprofit groups. The findings suggest that while the Internet can be a valuable fund-raising tool for charities, particularly in soliciting gifts after disasters like Hurricane Katrina, it is not a replacement for direct mail or other forms of fund-raising."

Survey Finds More Firms are Making Executive Pay Changes

"A growing number of U.S. companies are freezing salaries, reducing bonus pools and making other major changes to their executive pay programs, a consulting firm reported Tuesday. Of 145 companies surveyed during the first week of March, Watson Wyatt said roughly half plan to decrease this year's bonus pool by an average of 40%. Also, the number of companies that have frozen salaries jumped to 55%, from 21% when the companies were first polled in December 2008."

How Executives Botch Layoffs

"Layoffs have hit all industries and geographies and will continue to do so for some time. What we're experiencing now is the most painful part of a downturn. And while one would expect leaders to be more sophisticated than they were 30 years ago, I'm starting to hear familiar stories about executives who are making the same senseless mistakes that make layoffs more painful and costly than they need to be. . . ."

The First 100 Days: Ronald Reagan

"The First 100 Days: Reagan pushed his agenda of tax cuts and less government."

Why Powerful People Overestimate Themselves

"President Barack Obama isn't as great as he thinks he is. To be fair, neither were Presidents Bush or Clinton — or Washington or Lincoln, for that matter. The same can be said for every general who ever commanded an army or every boss who ever ran an office. The fact is, if there's one thing that defines people in powerful positions, it's that they overestimate what they can do with that power. That, at least, is the conclusion of a study published in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science. And while you may have always suspected that the folks who run the world aren't all they're cracked up to be, don't take too much satisfaction from the fact. It's the rest of us who wind up paying for their overreaching."

Pope Admits Mistakes in Letter About Holocaust Denier

Pope Benedict is somewhat unique in his willingness to admit mistakes. This is the second time he has done so:

"Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the letter — released in six languages — was 'really unusual and deserving of maximum attention.'"

The First 100 Days: Lyndon Johnson Fulfilled Kennedy's Legacy

The First 100 Days: Lyndon Johnson Fulfilled Kennedy's Legacy

The First 100 Days: Harry Truman Showed Decisiveness and Intelligence

The First 100 Days: Harry Truman Showed Decisiveness and Intelligence.

Seven Lessons for Leading in Crisis

"Virtually every American institution is facing major crises these days, from declining businesses to evaporating financial portfolios. To get out of these crises, authentic leaders must step forward and lead their organizations through them. . . .Here are seven lessons for leaders charged with leading their organizations through a crisis."

Bill Hybels Article - Preaching for Total Commitment

"Preaching for Total Commitment" - an article by Bill Hybels

Presidential Tax Returns

"Individual income tax returns — including those of public figures — are private information, protected by law from unauthorized disclosure. Indeed, the Internal Revenue Service is barred from releasing any taxpayer information whatsoever, except to authorized agencies and individuals. Like all other citizens, U.S. presidents enjoy this protection of their privacy. Since the early 1970s, however, most presidents have chosen to release their returns publicly. In the hope of making this information more widely available, the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts has compiled an archive of presidential tax returns."

Barna Survey Examines Changes in Worldview Among Christians over the Past 13 Years

"A new nationwide survey conducted by The Barna Group among a representative sample of adult explored how many have what might be considered a 'biblical worldview.' The report from Barna compared current results to the outcomes from a similar survey the company conducted in 1995, 2000 and 2005."

Woodrow Wilson: Foreign Policy as Spiritual Warfare

"Americans have generally seen President Woodrow Wilson as a tragic figure—an idealist whose fruitless quest to secure U.S. membership in the League of Nations ruined his health and left his country isolated from the remainder of the world for two decades. For many, Wilson was either a dreamer out of touch with the complexities of international affairs or a prophet whose rejected prescriptions for world peace could have prevented the resumption of a second world war only two decades after the end of the first. . . ."

A Q&A with Bill Hybels

A Q&A on discipleship, preaching, and pain.

CEOs Show How Cheating Death Can Change Your Life

"Last June, management consultant Grant Thornton surveyed 250 CEOs of companies with revenue of $50 million or more. Twenty-two percent said they have had an experience when they believed they would die and, of those, 61% said it changed their long-term perspective on life or career. Forty-one percent said it made them more compassionate leaders; 16% said it made them more ambitious; 14% said it made them less ambitious."

Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia

"In 2006, Alice and Moshe Shalvi of Shalvi Publishing Ltd. released Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia on CD-ROM, edited by Professors Paula Hyman of Yale and Dalia Ofer of Hebrew University in Jerusalem and sponsored by the Jewish Women's Archive. On March 1, 2009, in honor of Women's History Month, the Jewish Women's Archive brings the Encyclopedia online. Free. Updatable. Available anywhere in the world where there is Internet access."

A Forgotten Contribution

"Rosa Parks's name is known round the world, but what about Claudette Colvin? On March 2, 1955, nine months before Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., a skinny, 15-year-old schoolgirl was yanked by both wrists and dragged off a very similar bus."

Learning Agility Equals Leadership Success

"Learning agility is best fostered by encountering new challenges and getting the right feedback to improve your performance."

Merrill's Top 10 Earners Made $209 Million in 2008: Report

"Merrill Lynch & Co's 10 highest-paid employees got a total of $209 million in cash and stock in 2008, up slightly from $201 million they received a year earlier, the Wall Street Journal said, citing reviewed figures. Andrea Orcel, the firm's top investment banker, was paid $33.8 million in cash and stock in 2008, the paper said."

The World's Most Powerful Billionaires

"They might not be the richest people in the world, but these billionaires have tremendous sway over the world's markets, workers--and, in some cases, armies."

GE CEO Takes Responsibility for Tarnished Reputation

"Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt took responsibility for the U.S. conglomerate's "tarnished" reputation as a growth company, in a letter to shareholders released Monday. 'Our company's reputation was tarnished because we weren't the 'safe and reliable' growth company that is our aspiration. I accept responsibility for this. But, I think this environment presents an opportunity of a lifetime,' Immelt wrote in the letter included in the company's annual report. GE shares have lost 75 percent of their value over the past year, a steeper slide than either the blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average .DJI or the broad Standard & Poor's 500 index .SPX have witnessed."

Dartmouth's Historic Choice

"Dartmouth College on Monday named Jim Yong Kim as its next president. Kim is chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University, previously led the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS program, holds degrees in anthropology and medicine, and has won numerous honors, including the MacArthur "genius" fellowship."

Fortune: World's 50 Most Admired Companies 2009

Fortune: World's 50 Most Admired Companies 2009 - Note that you can also view previous years' lists.