“
To be successful, a Board of Directors must foster a culture of respect and appreciation.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
We want to be open-minded enough to accept radical new ideas when they occasionally come along, but we don't want to be so open-minded that our brains fall out.
”
”
Michael Shermer
“
The business landscape is a constantly evolving ecosystem. Changes in the macro
environment, such as technological disruptions or changing consumer preferences, can
rapidly alter the competitive landscape. A high-performing board needs to be adept at
strategic foresight.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
By mastering the art of corporate governance, board members and executives can unlock the full potential of their organizations, driving innovation, growth, and social impact.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
The business environment is constantly evolving. Economic fluctuations, technological disruptions, regulatory shifts, and competitive pressures demand that companies be able to adjust their goals and strategies.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
A good Board Of Directors team is one where ideas are flowing fluidly - and where each idea is met with an initial welcome, an intellectual challenge, an expression of gratitude, a rigorous scrutiny and a readiness for action.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Effective corporate governance ensures that the vision and strategy are aligned, with the board of directors playing a crucial role in defining the vision and overseeing the development and execution of the strategy.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
In some cases, you can tell how somebody is being treated by their own boss from the way they are treating someone to whom they are a boss.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
Get rid of all the cleaners, rubbish collectors, bus drivers, supermarket checkout staff and secretaries, for example, and society will very quickly grind to a halt. On the other hand, if we woke up one morning to find that all the highly paid advertising executives, management consultants and private equity directors had disappeared, society would go on much as it did before: in a lot of cases, probably quite a bit better. So,
”
”
Owen Jones (Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class)
“
manic-depressive illness, we proposed to the executive director of the Philharmonic a program based on the lives and music of several composers who had suffered from the illness, including Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz, and Hugo Wolf.
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind)
“
Let the workers in these plants get the same wages -- all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers -- yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders -- everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches! Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds. Why shouldn't they? They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are! Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket -- that and nothing else. Maybe
”
”
Smedley D. Butler (War Is A Racket!: And Other Essential Reading)
“
You wouldn't want to ever have a disconnect between your brain and your hands. That's called paralysis. In the same way, if there's a disconnect between the Board and the Executives, the result is paralysis.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
If life is a movie most people would consider themselves the star of their own feature. Guys might imagine they're living some action adventure epic. Chicks maybe are in a rose-colored fantasy romance. And homosexuals are living la vida loca in a fabulous musical. Still others may take the indie approach and think of themselves as an anti-hero in a coming of age flick. Or a retro badass in an exploitation B movie. Or the cable man in a very steamy adult picture. Some people's lives are experimental student art films that don't make any sense. Some are screwball comedies. Others resemble a documentary, all serious and educational. A few lives achieve blockbuster status and are hailed as a tribute to the human spirit. Some gain a small following and enjoy cult status. And some never got off the ground due to insufficient funding. I don't know what my life is but I do know that I'm constantly squabbling with the director over creative control, throwing prima donna tantrums and pouting in my personal trailor when things don't go my way.
Much of our lives is spent on marketing. Make-up, exercise, dieting, clothes, hair, money, charm, attitude, the strut, the pose, the Blue Steel look. We're like walking billboards advertising ourselves. A sneak peek of upcoming attractions. Meanwhile our actual production is in disarray--we're over budget, doing poorly at private test screenings and focus groups, creatively stagnant, morale low. So we're endlessly tinkering, touching up, editing, rewriting, tailoring ourselves to best suit a mass audience. There's like this studio executive in our heads telling us to cut certain things out, make it "lighter," give it a happy ending, and put some explosions in there too. Kids love explosions. And the uncompromising artist within protests: "But that's not life!" Thus the inner conflict of our movie life: To be a palatable crowd-pleaser catering to the mainstream... or something true to life no matter what they say?
”
”
Tatsuya Ishida
“
Board of Directors members should each bring something unique to the table; and they should share their uniqueness with the rest of the board to inform key decisions.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Even though I was appointed by the White House to be executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s agency in charge of the 2010 United States Dietary Guidelines, and even though I am a past president of the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior, I still don’t think most nutrition education is very effective. People know that an apple is better for them than a Snickers bar, but . . . they eat the Snickers bar anyway.
”
”
Brian Wansink (Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life)
“
When we ask ourselves how America became the world’s greatest jailer, it is natural to focus on bright, shiny objects: national campaigns, federal legislation, executive orders from the Oval Office. But we should train our eyes, also, on more mundane decisions and directives, many of which took place on the local level. Which agency director did a public official enlist in response to citizen complaints about used syringes in back alleys? Such small choices, made daily, over time, in every corner of our nation, are the bricks that built our prison nation.
”
”
James Forman Jr. (Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America)
“
You're the Executive Director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation - a foundation that says it wants to disseminate scientific information to the community regarding this syndrome but you can't, or won't, give me its signs and symptoms. That is confusing to me. I don't understand why there isn't a list."
A Conversation With Pamela Freyd, Ph.D. Co-Founder And Executive Director, False Memory Syndrome Foundation, Inc., Part I, Treating Abuse Today, Vol. III, No. 3.
”
”
David L. Calof
“
What is a club in any case? Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it. It’s not the television contracts, get-out clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes. It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. It’s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and, without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love.
”
”
Bobby Robson (Newcastle: My Kind of Toon)
“
Practically speaking, when more than 90 percent of women got married and divorce was rare, discrimination in favor of men at work meant discrimination in favor of their wives at home. When workplace discrimination worked in favor of women at home, no one called it sexism. Why? It was working for women. Only when discrimination switched from working for women to working against women (because more women were working) did it get called sexism. For example: During the years I was on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, the most resistant audiences I ever faced in the process of doing corporate workshops on equality in the workplace were not male executives—they were the wives of male executives.
”
”
Warren Farrell (The Myth of Male Power)
“
Jury trials are really nothing more than poorly written stage plays. You’ve got two authors writing opposing narratives and a director who is paid not to care about either outcome. Hired actors sit on either end of the stage, while unwitting audience members strive to remain quiet. No applause should be rendered, no gasps of glory. Witnesses sit agape with fury as they stumble across their rehearsed lines. If only they had practiced just once more. If only they had more time or a dress rehearsal, then they would recite their packaged words with such eloquent delivery that the critics in the jury box would believe only them.
”
”
Elizabeth L. Silver (The Execution of Noa P. Singleton)
“
If a Writer births the baby, then a Producer raises the child and sends it off to school.”
― Rona Edwards, I Liked It, Didn't Love It: Screenplay Development from the Inside Out
”
”
Rona Edwards (I Liked It, Didn't Love It: Screenplay Development from the Inside Out)
“
America likes to think
Every one can recover from every thing,
But about this,
Especially, America is wrong.
”
”
Liam Rector (The Executive Director of the Fallen World)
“
While nearly 80 percent of fifth graders report being engaged at school, that number drops to only 40 percent by the start of high school. And according to Brandon Busteed, executive director of education at Gallup, “Teachers are dead last among all professions Gallup studied in saying their ‘opinions count’ at work and their ‘supervisors create an open and trusting environment.’
”
”
Tony Wagner (Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era)
“
A famous case involved U2 guitarist “The Edge,” who purchased 156 acres of wild chaparral but wanted to build five mansions on it. Needless to say there was going to be a significant disruption of the fragile habitat, and his building plans were rejected. The executive director of the Coastal Commission called it “one of the three worst projects that I’ve seen in terms of environmental devastation.
”
”
Greg Graffin (Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence)
“
In the workplace, Japanese women have low participation and low pay. Participation declines steeply with increasing level of responsibility. Whereas women account for 49% of Japanese university students and 45% of entry-level job holders, they account for only 14% of university faculty positions (versus 33%–44% in the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, and France), 11% of middle-level to senior management positions, 2% of positions on boards of directors, 1% of business executive committee members, and less than 1% of CEOs. At those higher levels Japan lags behind all major industrial countries except (again) South Korea.
”
”
Jared Diamond (Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis)
“
A solemn day. Barring a stay by Sup Ct, & with my final nod, Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer. Mourn his victims. Justice.
[...] I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner's execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.
[...] We will be streaming live my press conference as soon as I'm told Gardner is dead. Watch it at www.attorneygeneral.Utah.gov/live.html.
”
”
Mark L. Shurtleff
“
The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto.
The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing.
In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out.
A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.”
Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag.
This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done.
After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber?
What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here.
It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness.
“What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?”
They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.
”
”
Russell Brand
“
Jerome Miller, the former executive director of the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives, described the dynamic this way: “There are certain code words that allow you never to have to say ‘race,’ but everybody knows that’s what you mean and ‘crime’ is one of those. … So when we talk about locking up more and more people, what we’re really talking about is locking up more and more black men.”35 Another commentator noted, “It is unnecessary to speak directly of race [today] because speaking about crime is talking about race.”36
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
And I did find it, in an impressive organization called the Mind Body Awareness (MBA) Project. MBA was doing mindfulness work (both meditation and yoga) with kids in juvenile hall and getting some solid results. I had seen the data on how many kids in juvie have their own fair share of ACEs (one study that came out later on looked at more than sixty thousand young people in the Florida juvenile justice system and found that 97 percent had experienced at least one ACE category and 52 percent four or more), so I figured it would be a good fit. After I met with MBA’s executive director, Gabriel Kram, and heard his story, I was even more
”
”
Nadine Burke Harris (The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity)
“
David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, respectively the Chair of the Board and Executive Director of Just Detention International (JDI), one of the most intrepid organizers against prison rape and for implementation of PREA, cites analyses in 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports, showing that there are over 216,600 cases of sexual abuse in prisons in a single year. They continue, “that’s almost 600 people a day—25 an hour.”[113] The most vulnerable among all groups are trans persons, the increasing number of mentally ill that have been taken in by the prisons, and also women. Nearly half of these violations, according to still more recent BJS studies, are committed by prison staff, the very ones, observes JDI pointedly, whose job it is to ensure their safety from such violation.
”
”
Mark Lewis Taylor (The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, 2nd Edition)
“
Anne Robertson, a Methodist pastor, writer, and executive director of the Massachusetts Bible Society, explains how the Greek origins of the words happiness and joy hold important meaning for us today. She explains that the Greek word for happiness is Makarios, which was used to describe the freedom of the rich from normal cares and worries, or to describe a person who received some form of good fortune, such as money or health. Robertson compares this to the Greek word for joy which is chairo. Chairo was described by the ancient Greeks as the “culmination of being” and the “good mood of the soul.” Robertson writes, “Chairo is something, the ancient Greeks tell us, that is found only in God and comes with virtue and wisdom. It isn’t a beginner’s virtue; it comes as the culmination. They say its opposite is not sadness, but fear.”1
”
”
Brené Brown (The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are)
“
TAT: I find I'm still left wanting to know how to tell if my patient has false memory syndrome. What's the test? How do I determine if my patient is suffering from this syndrome?
Freyd: What are the tests if some body is suffering from " repressed memory syndrome?"
TAT: Well, I can give you several symptom clusters - dissociative, cognitive, affective, somatic effects they're well documented. But, I'm asking you the question. You're telling me, David, as a clinician: you must be aware of the possibility your patients may have false memory syndrome. Okay, how should I be aware of that? How am I going to know? How do I test for it?
Freyd: David, I'm going to ask Dr. Paul McHugh to talk to you because he is a clinician and I have stated from the beginning that I am not.
TAT: I appreciate that, Pamela. But here's my issue with you not knowing. If I was talking to the Executive Director of the Muscular Dystrophy Association, who presumably is also not a clinician, I'll bet he or she could give me the signs and symptoms of muscular dystrophy. But in the case of false memory syndrome, so far no one seems to be able to say.
Treating Abuse Today, 3(4), pp. 26-33
”
”
David L. Calof
“
Don Chrisantos Michael Wanzala "Don CM Wanzala" (born April 13), popularly known as Don Santo (stylized as DON SANTO) is a Kenyan singer, rapper, songwriter, arranger, actor, author, content producer, Photo-Videographer, Creative Director (Blame It On Don), entrepreneur, record executive and Leader of the Klassik Nation and chairman and president of Global Media Ltd, based in Nairobi City in Kenya.
The genius of DON SANTO rests in his willingness to break from traditional formula and constantly push the envelope. He flips the method of the moment with undeniable swagger and bold African sensibility.
As a songwriter, Santo revisits simple, but profound aspects of the human experience – love, lust, desire, joy, and pain that define classical art and drama. He applies his concept to rich, full vocals that exude his intended effect. It is this uncanny ability to compose classics and deliver electrifying live performances that define everything that is essential DON SANTO. In 2015, Santo won the East Africa Music Awards in the Artist of the year Category while his song "Sina Makosa" won the Song of The year. A believer in GOD, FAMILY & GOOD LIFE (Klassikanity).
”
”
Don Santo
“
For years I’ve been asking myself (and my readers) whether these propagandists—commonly called corporate or capitalist journalists—are evil or stupid. I vacillate day by day. Most often I think both. But today I’m thinking evil. Here’s why. You may have heard of John Stossel. He’s a long-term analyst, now anchor, on a television program called 20/20, and is most famous for his segment called “Give Me A Break,” in which, to use his language, he debunks commonly held myths. Most of the rest of us would call what he does “lying to serve corporations.” For example, in one of his segments, he claimed that “buying organic [vegetables] could kill you.” He stated that specially commissioned studies had found no pesticide residues on either organically grown or pesticide-grown fruits and vegetables, and had found further that organic foods are covered with dangerous strains of E. coli. But the researchers Stossel cited later stated he misrepresented their research. The reason they didn’t find any pesticides is because they never tested for them (they were never asked to). Further, they said Stossel misrepresented the tests on E. coli. Stossel refused to issue a retraction. Worse, the network aired the piece two more times. And still worse, it came out later that 20/20’s executive director Victor Neufeld knew about the test results and knew that Stossel was lying a full three months before the original broadcast.391 This is not unusual for Stossel and company.
”
”
Derrick Jensen (Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization)
“
. . . as a businessman, he thought the idea of having a centralized Health Service made a lot of sense, because ultimately it could be run as a business, with shareholders and a board of directors, and a chief executive, and that was the way to make sure it was efficient, to run it along business lines, i.e. with a view to making a profit. . . . in fact the Health Service, if properly managed, could turn out to be the most profitable business of all time, because health care was like prostitution, it was something for which the demand could never dry up; it was inexhaustible. He said that if someone could get himself appointed manager of a privatized Health Service, he would soon be just about the richest and most powerful man in the country.
”
”
Jonathan Coe (What a Carve Up! (The Winshaw Legacy, #1))
“
Through the fall, the president’s anger seemed difficult to contain. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” then followed up with a threat to “totally destroy” the country. When neo-Nazis and white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of them killed a protester and injured a score of others, he made a brutally offensive statement condemning violence “on many sides … on many sides”—as if there was moral equivalence between those who were fomenting racial hatred and violence and those who were opposing it. He retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda that had been posted by a convicted criminal leader of a British far-right organization. Then as now, the president’s heedless bullying and intolerance of variance—intolerance of any perception not his own—has been nurturing a strain of insanity in public dialogue that has been long in development, a pathology that became only more virulent when it migrated to the internet. A person such as the president can on impulse and with minimal effort inject any sort of falsehood into public conversation through digital media and call his own lie a correction of “fake news.” There are so many news outlets now, and the competition for clicks is so intense, that any sufficiently outrageous statement made online by anyone with even the faintest patina of authority, and sometimes even without it, will be talked about, shared, and reported on, regardless of whether it has a basis in fact. How do you progress as a culture if you set out to destroy any common agreement as to what constitutes a fact? You can’t have conversations. You can’t have debates. You can’t come to conclusions. At the same time, calling out the transgressor has a way of giving more oxygen to the lie. Now it’s a news story, and the lie is being mentioned not just in some website that publishes unattributable gossip but in every reputable newspaper in the country. I have not been looking to start a personal fight with the president. When somebody insults your wife, your instinctive reaction is to want to lash out in response. When you are the acting director, or deputy director, of the FBI, and the person doing the insulting is the chief executive of the United States, your options have guardrails. I read the president’s tweets, but I had an organization to run. A country to help protect. I had to remain independent, neutral, professional, positive, on target. I had to compartmentalize my emotions. Crises taught me how to compartmentalize. Example: the Boston Marathon bombing—watching the video evidence, reviewing videos again and again of people dying, people being mutilated and maimed. I had the primal human response that anyone would have. But I know how to build walls around that response and had to build them then in order to stay focused on finding the bombers. Compared to experiences like that one, getting tweeted about by Donald Trump does not count as a crisis. I do not even know how to think about the fact that the person with time on his hands to tweet about me and my wife is the president of the United States.
”
”
Andrew G. McCabe (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump)
“
I do not believe in supporting bailouts without strong
ramifications. It is a fool’s fantasy to think we can live in a globally
connected economy and never have a situation arise where the government
prudently steps in to prevent a failure that might lead to
catastrophic ramifications. In most cases, I believe it would be much
better to let bailed-out companies fail when they have mismanaged
themselves, rather than waste taxpayer money propping up greedy
idiots who are trying to salvage their own bonuses; however, there
are exceptions to almost every rule. The wiser course would be to
penalize the CEO or board of directors who drove the company
to the brink of failure. The most obvious punishment would be the
elimination of any “golden parachutes” or bonuses for the executive
and seizure of all company-derived assets, including any attempts to
hide company assets in the spouse’s name. When C-level executives
come to the realization that managing a company is not a game and
that there are serious consequences for their actions, we will see fewer
instances of requests for bailouts.
”
”
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
“
Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33
TAT: I see the agenda. But let's go back: one of the contentions the therapeutic community has about the Foundation's professed scientific credibility is your use of the term "syndrome." It seems to us that what's happening here is that based solely on anecdotal, unverified reports, the Foundation has started a public relations campaign rather than a bonafide research effort and simply announced to the world that an epidemic of this syndrome exists. The established scientific and clinical organizations are taking you on about this and it's that kind of thing that makes us feel like this effort is not really based on science. Do you have a response to that?
Freyd: The response I would make regarding the name of the Foundation is that it will certainly be one of the issues brought up during our scientific meeting this weekend. But let me add that the term, "syndrome," in terms of it being a psychological syndrome, parallels, say, the rape trauma syndrome. Given that and the fact that there are seldom complaints over the use of the term "syndrome" for that, I think that it isn't "syndrome" that's bothering people as much as the term "false."
TAT: No. Frankly it's not. It is the term "syndrome." The term false memory is almost 100 years old. It's nothing new, but false memory syndrome is newly coined. Here's our issue with your use of the word "syndrome." The rape trauma syndrome is a good example because it has a very well defined list of signs and symptoms. Having read your literature, we are still at a loss to know what the signs and symptoms of "false memory syndrome" are. Can you tell us succinctly?
Freyd: The person with whom I would like to have you discuss that to quote is Dr. Paul McHugh on our advisory board, because he is a clinician.
TAT: I would be happy to do that. But if I may, let me take you on a little bit further about this.
Freyd: Sure, sure that's fair.
TAT: You're the Executive Director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation - a foundation that says it wants to disseminate scientific information to the community regarding this syndrome but you can't, or won't, give me its signs and symptoms. That is confusing to me. I don't understand why there isn't a list.
”
”
David L. Calof
“
After a series of promotions—store manager at twenty-two, regional manager at twenty-four, director at twenty-seven—I was a fast-track career man, a personage of sorts. If I worked really hard, and if everything happened exactly like it was supposed to, then I could be a vice president by thirty-two, a senior vice president by thirty-five or forty, and a C-level executive—CFO, COO, CEO—by forty-five or fifty, followed of course by the golden parachute. I’d have it made then! I’d just have to be miserable for a few more years, to drudge through the corporate politics and bureaucracy I knew so well. Just keep climbing and don't look down. Misery, of course, encourages others to pull up a chair and stay a while. And so, five years ago, I convinced my best friend Ryan to join me on the ladder, even showed him the first rung. The ascent is exhilarating to rookies. They see limitless potential and endless possibilities, allured by the promise of bigger paychecks and sophisticated titles. What’s not to like? He too climbed the ladder, maneuvering each step with lapidary precision, becoming one of the top salespeople—and later, top sales managers—in the entire company.10 And now here we are, submerged in fluorescent light, young and ostensibly successful. A few years ago, a mentor of mine, a successful businessman named Karl, said to me, “You shouldn’t ask a man who earns twenty thousand dollars a year how to make a hundred thousand.” Perhaps this apothegm holds true for discontented men and happiness, as well. All these guys I emulate—the men I most want to be like, the VPs and executives—aren’t happy. In fact, they’re miserable. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad people, but their careers have changed them, altered them physically and emotionally: they explode with anger over insignificant inconveniences; they are overweight and out of shape; they scowl with furrowed brows and complain constantly as if the world is conspiring against them, or they feign sham optimism which fools no one; they are on their second or third or fourth(!) marriages; and they almost all seem lonely. Utterly alone in a sea of yes-men and women. Don’t even get me started on their health issues. I’m talking serious health issues: obesity, gout, cancer, heart attacks, high blood pressure, you name it. These guys are plagued with every ailment associated with stress and anxiety. Some even wear it as a morbid badge of honor, as if it’s noble or courageous or something. A coworker, a good friend of mine on a similar trajectory, recently had his first heart attack—at age thirty. But I’m the exception, right?
”
”
Joshua Fields Millburn (Everything That Remains: A Memoir by The Minimalists)
“
Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare.
Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest.
Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine.
In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.
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Hank Bracker
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My typical day began at five o'clock in the morning when I would finish reading scripts by the side of Rebecca's bed until she woke up at seven. It was thrilling to find a script that I loved, something I desperately wanted to make. And when I found one, my day was made by seven A.M.
If I didn't have a script to finish, I had notes to make on those I had read. And if I'd finished my notes, I went downstairs to exercise.
After mornings with Rebecca, I'd arrive at the office at nine-thirty. The phone calls had started long before I got there. By ten o'clock I was in a staff meeting, and depending on the day of the week, it was either a production, marketing/distribution or business-affairs meeting.
By eleven-thirty, I might be in a meeting with an executive about a particular movie or problem. By twelve, I was meeting with a director I was trying to seduce back to the studio.
By twelve forty-five, I'd get in my car and drive across town to a lunch meeting with an agent, a producer, a writer or a movie star. While driving, I'd start to return the phone calls that had started before I ever arrived at my office.
At two-thirty, I was back in the car, returning more phone calls, the calls from early morning, from mid-morning, plus East Coast and Europe calls that came in during lunch.
At two forty-five, I was back in the office. Inevitably, there were people waiting to see me, executives with personal problems, political problems, and/or production problems. In between, I returned and made more phone calls.
At three-thirty, there could be a meeting with someone I was trying to bring to the studio. At four-thirty, there was a script meeting with an executive, writer, producer and/or director. At five o'clock, there were selected dailies of the movies we were shooting. And if I hadn't finished watching them by six-thirty, the rest were put on tape for me to watch later at home.
At six-thirty, I'd jump into my car and return more phone calls on my drive home. The call sheet numbered one hundred to one hundred and fifty calls a day. And I always felt it was very important to return every call. The lesson here is people remember when you don't call them back.
I'd go home to be with Rebecca. If I didn't have a business dinner or a sneak preview of one of our movies, I had to go to a black-tie event. There was at least one of them a week, honoring someone from our industry. I went out of respect for the talent involved and my counterparts at the other studios. So Rebecca would keep me company while I washed off my makeup, put on new makeup, dressed in black tie, kissed her good-bye and shot out the door.
That's where men really have it good: they just put on a tux and go.
After I got home at ten-thirty, I would sit on the chair next to Rebecca's bed. Watching her sleep dissolved all the stress in my body.
Then I would get up, either finish watching the dailies, or read a script, wash my face and fall into bed at eleven-thirty.
But the part of my workday that made me the happiest was when I was closest to the actual making of a movie.
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Dawn Steel (They Can Kill You..but They Can't Eat You)
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Once it had been simple. Civil rights supporters knew who their enemies were: special interests such as the real estate associations (who lobbied against the Mathias compromise for making something evil “palatable to the American people”). The lunatic far right (the executive director of the Liberty Lobby testified that King’s movement employed “mass brainwashing” just like “in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Communist Russia, and Communist China”). The old-line racist Dixie gargoyles (they kept on rehearsing for a revival of Birth of a Nation: Senator George Smathers wondering why “when a colored boy rapes a white girl, he gets off easier”; Representative William C. Cramer raising the specter of the “Social Security widow in my district” forced to rent to a black man—and you could almost picture the lusty young buck he had in mind). This opposition was predictable. The curveball was the new opposition: the Pucinskis and the Rostenkowskis; the Jerry Fords, moderate Republicans who used to be the backbone of every civil rights vote. Now, the Dixie gargoyles were gloating, an ancient piece of Southern political folk wisdom was receiving its vindication: that once civil rights bills started affecting North as much as South, it wouldn’t just be Southerners filibustering civil rights bills.
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Anonymous
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Whether this is your first Star Wars adventure, or one of many over the years: Thank you. Thank you for your dedication to and passion for the Star Wars galaxy. Because of fans like you around the world, the Force will be with us, always. Dave Filoni Executive Producer and Supervising Director, Star Wars Rebels
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John Jackson Miller (A New Dawn)
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Philip Zelikow, Executive Director Christopher A.Kojm, Deputy Executive Director Daniel Marcus
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Anonymous
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When approximately 80% of the environmental impact is predetermined at the concept and design stage there is clearly action to take. As Kate Krebbs, executive director of the National Recycling Coalition (NRC) in the USA says, “Waste is a design flaw.
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Adrian Shaughnessy (How to Be a Graphic Designer without Losing Your Soul)
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Promotions Every time your company gives someone a promotion, everyone else at that person’s organizational level evaluates the promotion and judges whether merit or political favors yielded it. If the latter, then the other employees generally react in one of three ways: 1. They sulk and feel undervalued. 2. They outwardly disagree, campaign against the person, and undermine them in their new position. 3. They attempt to copy the political behavior that generated the unwarranted promotion. Clearly, you don’t want any of these behaviors in your company. Therefore, you must have a formal, visible, defensible promotion process that governs every employee promotion. Often this process must be different for people on your own staff. (The general process may involve various managers who are familiar with the employee’s work; the executive process should include the board of directors.) The purpose of the process is twofold. First, it will give the organization confidence that the company at least attempted to base the promotion on merit. Second, the process will produce the information necessary for your team to explain the promotion decisions you made.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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but as chairman of CHAMP I have been amazed by the extraordinary range of Nick’s contacts and friends, a network enabling him to gain access and knowledge about almost any project in whatever sector we may be considering. Nick has been a long and strong friend and a most effective non-executive director.
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Bill Ferris (Inside Private Equity: Thrills, spills and lessons by the author of Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained)
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Koppelman (TW: @briankoppelman, briankoppelman.com) is a screenwriter, novelist, director, and producer. Prior to his hit show Billions, which he co-created and executive produced (and co-wrote
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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Literature strengthens our imagination. If we all have the tools to try to imagine a better world, we’re already halfway there.” #DailyNews:
@nationalbook
executive director Lisa Lucas
@likaluca
) is confident about the future of reading.
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Lisa Lucas
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Needing a second opinion This one. I think this is the one women in the workplace are scared of. I know I am. Broad City is a very collaborative environment, and I trust everyone we’ve hired to work with us, so I naturally ask people’s opinions. But when you get a new job, a new assignment, or a promotion, the fear of not being good enough, of not knowing everything can seep in. In the last season of Broad City (4), I directed two episodes. This was a new experience for me, and one I took very seriously. But I found, during the process, that a big insecurity for me is the fear that if I need a second opinion, that means I don’t know what I’m doing. This is false, I do know what I’m doing, but it’s that vulnerability, that want for another set of eyes on my decision that can make me shaky. I ultimately made all the decisions I needed to—after using my resources aka asking questions—but in order to do that, I had to continually let go of this unease that someone from a dark, back corner would pop out, pointing directly at me, yelling about how I’m a fraud for asking for help while in charge. That I’d be plucked up by a huge claw and dropped outside on the sidewalk, banished from taking on this new role. This fear is mindless. Understandable, but stupid. Crews are a team. Any business is a team, and the whole point of having people do different jobs and be experts in their specific department is for them to help in any way they know how. The director isn’t there to bark out orders. They are the conductor bringing everyone’s talents together to execute their own artistic vision. Asking and bouncing ideas off people, and even changing your mind, is allowed. It’s so hard to ever show any sort of weakness, especially when you’re a woman at the top of the project, in a business you never thought you’d actually be able to break into. But going through all the possibilities and asking for help is not weak, it’s smart. I’m going to go ahead and dog-ear this paragraph so even I can come back and remind myself.
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Abbi Jacobson (I Might Regret This: Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff)
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In the time of Google, knowledge isn’t the differentiator. Social emotional health is,” declares Michelle Kinder, the executive director of Momentous. “Kids need to know how to think, not just what to think.
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Joe Hirsch (The Feedback Fix: Dump the Past, Embrace the Future, and Lead the Way to Change)
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Eighty years ago on July 2, 1937 Amelia Earhart, the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, disappeared while attempting to circumnavigate the world in a Lockheed Model 10- Electra. Her expedition, sponsored by Purdue University, a public research university located in West Lafayette, Indiana, was brought to an end when this daring woman aviator and her navigator and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared near Howland Island in the central part of the Pacific Ocean. Since that time it was generally assumed that she had crashed at sea and simply disappeared beneath the waves of an unforgiving ocean.
All the speculation ended on Sunday July 9, 2017 when Shawn Henry, a former executive assistant director for the FBI, brought world attention on the “History Channel” to a photograph that apparently shows Earhart and Noona on the dock of Jaluit Atoll, overlooking the SS Kaoshu towing a barge, with what looks like the Electra they had been flying. The intensive research and analysis that Shawn Henry and his team conducted presents compelling evidence and leaves no doubt but that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan had survived the crash. The team’s research also presents evidence that Amelia Earhart was held as a prisoner of war on the island of Saipan by the Japanese and died while in their custody.
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Hank Bracker
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As America’s first movie sweetheart, Pickford was savvy enough to leave her name off the executive producer and director credits in order to play to the public’s perception of her as a sweet, innocent young girl, but industry insiders knew that she called all the shots.
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Ann Shen (Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World (Ann Shen Legendary Ladies Collection))
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On Thursday, February 19, 2015, two months after the United States and Cuba announced a willingness to re-establish normal diplomacy, after over 5 decades of hostile relations, the United States House Minority leader and eight fellow Democratic Party lawmakers went to Havana to meet with the Cuban Vice President Miguel Díaz-Canel. On February 27th, Cuban Foreign Ministry Director for North America, Josefina Vidal, and her delegation met at the State Department in Washington, D.C.
Although most Cubans and many Americans have a positive view towards improving diplomatic relations, there are conservative legislators in both the U.S. House and Senate that have not joined in the promotion and necessary détente and good will in easing the normalization of relations between the two countries. On May 29, 2015, by Executive Order, President Obama took a first step by removing Cuba from the list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism.”
Since then President Trump has been determined to overturn most of what has been passed by the former administration. On June 16, 2017 President Trump moved to reverse many of President Obama’s policies towards Cuba. According to the CATO Institute the alleged justification for this reversal is that it will pressure the Cuban government to make concessions on human rights and political policies towards the Island Nation. Apparently Trump’s new restrictions will impose limits on travel and how U.S. Companies will be able to do business in Cuba.
Although the final say regarding the normalization between the two countries is in the hands of politicians representing their various constituencies. The United States has long worked and traded with other Communist nations. Recently additional pressure has been applied by corporations that, quite frankly, are fed up with the slowness of the process. The idea that everything hinges on the fact Cuba is a Communist country, run by a dictatorship, does not take into account the plight of the individual Cuban citizens. The United States may wish for a different government; however it is up to Cuba to decide what form of government they will eventually have.
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Hank Bracker
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Jason Gesser is one of the leading players who has always benefitted the team. In addition to this, Jason delves into the efforts in his role with the Cougar Athletic Fund to reconnect with the past student-athletes to the WSU and shares about his thoughts on earning his executive MBA degree from the WSU Carson College of Business.
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Jason Gesser
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In 2014, former Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John Rizzo, wrote, ‘The CIA has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors.
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Tom Secker (National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood)
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In 2014, former Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John Rizzo, wrote, ‘The CIA has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors.
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Matthew Alford (National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood)
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Sara Wallace is the Executive Producer at SMUGGLER, a production firm that specializes in movies, commercials, music videos, and theatre.
With headquarters in London, New York, and Los Angeles, SMUGGLER is a global production firm. SMUGGLER has an unrivaled pool of best-in-class, award-winning directors and production expertise.
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Sara Wallace
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Every successful movement for change has three phases. The first is an emergent phase, in which a keystone change is identified, constituencies on the Spectrum of Allies are mapped out, and institutions within the Pillars of Power are determined. The second phase, or the engagement phase, is when tactics are designed to target particular constituencies and institutions for mobilization. The last phase, or the victory phase, is typically triggered by an outside event, which lowers resistance thresholds and sets a cascade in motion.40 An election is falsified, a regime’s brutality is exposed, a new technology is introduced into the market, a chief executive fires a well-liked employee (or an FBI director) without cause, or maybe crucial intelligence is acquired on a key terrorist.
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Greg Satell (Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change)
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Just as well, since the director, casting director, and studio executives would probably have frowned on them ending the audition desperately dry-humping.
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Ava Wilder (How to Fake it in Hollywood)
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The concept is never what attracts me; it’s the execution. There are lots of shows about bars, news and radio stations, cabdrivers, and shrinks. I want to see what the characters that are put into these situations do. I’m concerned about believability and the economy of the comedy, the shortest distance between the character and the laughter, and the best way to get there. When I direct an episode, I have a lot of notes. I am apt to tell writers, “Fifty percent of what I say is gold and fifty percent is garbage. It’s your job to figure out which is which.
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James Burrows (Directed by James Burrows: Five Decades of Stories from the Legendary Director of Taxi, Cheers, Frasier, Friends, Will & Grace, and More)
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During the period, June 2006 – October 2008 the media company floated many shell companies across global jurisdictions such as Sweden, Netherlands, UK, Mauritius and Dubai (over 30) etc. to bring into India via illegal hawala route a sum of over USD 150 million dollars. This is clear case of violation of Income Tax Dept and ED provisions. After the execution of sham transactions many of these companies were closed. In some foreign companies, NDTV’s prominent faces Barkha Dutt, Vikram Chandra and Sonia Singh were also shareholders or directors. All these companies were just paper companies at some hotel address or some attorney addresses.
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Sree Iyer (NDTV Frauds V2.0 - The Real Culprit: A completely revamped version that shows the extent to which NDTV and a Cabal will stoop to hide a saga of Money Laundering, Tax Evasion and Stock Manipulation.)
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the executive director of the WHO emergencies program, Dr. Michael Ryan, put his own spin on this observation. “Perfection is the enemy of the good when it comes to emergency management,” he said. “Speed trumps perfection, and the problem in society we have at the moment is everyone is afraid of making a mistake, everyone is afraid of the consequence of error. But the greatest error is not to move. The greatest error is to be paralyzed by the fear of failure.
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Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
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The likes of you and I cannot “give” to the federal government, as under the Federal Acquisition Regulations this is considered to be a risk for exerting undue influence. But the CDC has established a nonprofit “CDC Foundation.” According to the CDC’s own website [419]: Established by Congress as an independent, nonprofit organization, the CDC Foundation is the sole entity authorized by Congress to mobilize philanthropic partners and private-sector resources to support CDC’s critical health protection mission. Likewise, the NIH has established the “Foundation for the National Institutes of Health,” currently headed by CEO Dr. Julie Gerberding (formerly CDC director, then president of Merck Vaccines, then chief patient officer and executive vice president, Population Health & Sustainability at Merck and Company—where she had responsibility for Merck’s ESG score compliance). Dr. Gerberding’s career provides a case history illustrating the ties between the administrative state and corporate America.
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Robert W Malone MD MS (Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming)
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The likes of you and I cannot “give” to the federal government, as under the Federal Acquisition Regulations this is considered to be a risk for exerting undue influence. But the CDC has established a nonprofit “CDC Foundation.” According to the CDC’s own website [419]: Established by Congress as an independent, nonprofit organization, the CDC Foundation is the sole entity authorized by Congress to mobilize philanthropic partners and private-sector resources to support CDC’s critical health protection mission. Likewise, the NIH has established the “Foundation for the National Institutes of Health,” currently headed by CEO Dr. Julie Gerberding (formerly CDC director, then president of Merck Vaccines, then chief patient officer and executive vice president, Population Health & Sustainability at Merck and Company—where she had responsibility for Merck’s ESG score compliance). Dr. Gerberding’s career provides a case history illustrating the ties between the administrative state and corporate America. These congressionally chartered nonprofit organizations provide a vehicle whereby the medical-pharmaceutical complex can funnel money into the NIH and CDC to influence both research agendas and policies.
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Robert W Malone MD MS (Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming)
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Democracy is on the ropes, with double- and triple-blows punching at it from crass consumerism, commonplace fascism and runaway capitalism. All of this leaves young people in the cross-hairs of politicians, executive directors, funders, and evaluators, each of whom is ready and eager to pull the trigger. By doing this, they lay waste to the present as well as the future, sacrificing children and youth to line their own pockets, perpetuate their missions, and dismantle society as we have known it.
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Adam F.C. Fletcher (Democracy Deficit Disorder: Learning Democracy with Young People (Counterpoints: Studies in Criticality, 540))
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Autism Speaks organization. For the nonprofit’s first ten years, none of its board members were openly autistic, and at the same time, many autistic people vocalized that they did not want to be cured. Similarly, in 2009, the organization put out an ad directed by Academy Award–winning director Alfonso Cuarón titled “I Am Autism,” which depicted autism as a menacing force. “I know where you live and guess what? I live there too,” the voice-over said, adding that it worked faster than deadly diseases like pediatric AIDS, cancer, and diabetes combined. “And if you are happily married, I will make sure that your marriage fails,” the voice went on, pledging to bankrupt families (there is some irony, of course, that a millionaire executive’s charity would put out such an ad). The ad ultimately faced massive pushback, and it was removed from its website.
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Eric Garcia (We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation)
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Relationships provide a portal for facts to enter and learning to occur. They create what Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy, refers to as “proximity.” People need to get proximate to one another for change to occur.
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Robert Livingston (The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth About Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations)
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A few weeks later, the United States Steel Corporation was formed. It was a testament to the power of Morgan, and the entirely unregulated securities market, that he could go from a handshake to a public company in less than eight weeks. As the syndicate manager, Morgan’s firm deposited $25 million to execute the mechanics of the transaction. Morgan’s role was to organize the consolidation, sell shares to the public, and serve on its board of directors. Morgan himself was not a major shareholder of any of the consolidations he sponsored or underwrote. His compensation generally came in the form of fees for arranging these massive transactions. U.S. Steel combined every major steel consolidation of the previous three years, along with Carnegie Steel, into a superconsolidation. On March 29, when the shares were brought to market, U.S. Steel became the first company to be valued at over $1 billion.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
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At the same time, many of the pioneering venture capitalists were not moneymen but graduates of the semiconductor industry. One of the eight men who had formed Fairchild Semiconductor, Eugene Kleiner, would found the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 1972, not coincidentally the year after the Intel IPO. In the same year, Don Valentine, a former Fairchild sales executive, founded Sequoia Capital. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia would become as intrinsic to Silicon Valley as the entrepreneurs themselves—the equivalent of the grand Hollywood studios, with the entrepreneurs analogous to actors, directors, and producers. Over the next forty-five years, several of America’s most valuable corporations, including three of the top four, would be funded early on by Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia or both. This birth of venture capital—a rebirth, really—was a return to the most American of roots, older than its founders’ democracy. The organizers of the Virginia Company had called upon “adventurers” to risk capital. A few years later, the Merchant Adventurers in London coffeehouses had agreed to finance the voyage of a large molasses ship known as the Mayflower. Three hundred fifty years later, an improved concept of venture capital was being applied to the next era of American discovery.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
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Even if you know nothing about the process of filmmaking…you can sense the fear, excitement, and risk that went into a scene like that. For the writer to conceive it, for the director to facilitate it, for the actors to execute it, and for the editor to hinge it to the flow of a thousand other moments with as much gambled on them.
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Patton Oswalt (Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film)
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it is bewitching to watch both men [Burton and Gielgud] struggle for Shakespeare's meaning while they squirm as individuals beneath the weight of their own psychologies. This is the problem for every interpretive artist who ever drew breath. He must be true to the writer and true to himself. He literally serves two masters. To expect the interpreter to be a puppet who conceives and executes the ideal Hamlet (or Puck or Lady Macbeth or Merton of the Movies) is to deny the human condition. An actor can discipline his effects in order to avoid distortion of the play - giving up, sometimes, his most popular tricks - but to expect him to reject the totality of his personality in order to imitate The Character is madness.
The actor is stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck the actor. Directors sometimes pretend that the character is everything and that the actor must adjust no matter how uncomfortable it makes him, but the actors job is to preserve himself somehow - not by distorting the play... but by admitting his own limitations, by knowing what he can make real for the audience and what he can't. If the actor has been miscast, he cannot compensate for the error by destroying his God-given nature on the stage. It is the producer's job to know beforehand how flexible the actor is.
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William Charles Redfield (Letters from an Actor)
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For a recent example, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was an executive at Booz Allen, a private intelligence firm that is dependent on government contracts for nearly all of its revenue.
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Aaron Good (American Exception: Empire and the Deep State)
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We assign a buddy or a mentor to help them with questions. We’ll schedule time with our executive director for the first day. We’ll schedule welcome lunches with their team and various other people.” But it starts on the first day. “We make certain the manager welcomes the new hire at the front door.” New hires are introduced at staff devotions, and their new coworkers pray for them and thank God that they are an answer to prayer. The whole experience is designed to give the new employees total confidence that they made the right decision and have truly taken the right next step in God’s pathway for their calling. The third stage is true onboarding, which takes place over the first ninety days. It revolves around not only role-centered training but also organizational mission, vision, values, and history, delivered in dialogue with multiple voices in the organization
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Al Lopus (Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being)
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In late 2000, a group of IBP managers decided they wanted to take the company private by buying it from its public shareholders. The managers put together a bid with a private investment company and presented it to IBP’s board of directors. Smithfield heard about the deal and decided to make a bid of its own. IBP had become the nation’s second-biggest pork producer. If Smithfield bought IBP, it would be the indomitable leader of beef and pork production, boxing Tyson into the chicken business alone. It seemed inevitable that, one day, the company would buy Tyson as well. Only the biggest could survive. Johnny decided he wasn’t going to let that happen. Tyson Foods would buy IBP. The company would have to borrow billions to do it and it would need to pony up a huge portion of the company’s stock. Johnny would be mortgaging everything his father and his grandfather had built. It was the riskiest acquisition the company had ever contemplated. Everyone around him realized that when Johnny looked at IBP, he finally had his vision. Don Tyson thought the IBP acquisition was a bad idea. The company had been burned during the 1990s for straying outside the chicken industry and trying to buy its way into markets it couldn’t control and that didn’t fit with its primary strategy of vertical integration. Buying IBP would overshadow the chicken operations of Tyson Foods and saddle the company with cattle and pork businesses that Tyson executives poorly understood.
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Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
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Paige Goepfert is a managing director of the Andersen Private Client Services team and works with ultra-high-net-worth families, family offices, business owners, and executives on tax planning and income tax compliance. Paige says that, “before considering the tax implications of a family office, family office principals are well served to think about the catalysts for and objectives of their family office. The structure, including how the management services are going to be provided and the type of entity formed for the management company, will determine the tax impact. “A common mistake I see is when families initially contemplate forming a family office solely because of the tax benefits they hope to obtain. While there may be tax benefits from a family office structure, anticipated tax benefits should not be the catalyst for setting up a family office . . . We [also] sometimes see families stuck in a certain mindset even when their goals and tax laws are constantly changing. For example, an older family member may feel like they have already given too much to the next generation or their grandchildren and, on principle, will not consider what they are leaving
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Scott Saslow (Building a Sustainable Family Office: An Insider’s Guide to What Works and What Doesn’t)
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Meet one of the leading creative directors Roger Hooks, Jr. He is a renowned “S&P 500 Creative Executive”, who has successfully established his name in the creative industry.
He possesses a boasted portfolio in package design of Pacific-Rim makers of entertainment PC peripherals and add-on cards with category best sellers up in down the aisles of Fry's Electronics, Micro Center, Ritz Camera, Best Buy, and Good Guys in their brick-and Mortar Hey-Day. Also, he is a Platinum Award winner in copywriting, a Gold Award winner in advertising campaigns, and a Gold Award winner in special events.
So, if you are searching for a professional creative strategist, you must contact Roger Hooks, Jr. Feel free to reach out.
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Roger Hooks
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So here we are today, where we have toxicologists and experts in food safety who disagree with the AHA’s position on the safety of polyunsaturated fats, and, because the AHA’s vast influence gives it control over nutrition thought, these professionals have trouble getting necessary work funded. Meanwhile, the AHA continues to actively promote seed oils, and it continues to support those, like Dr. Walter Willett, who dismiss or discredit experts like Dr. Chris Ramsden who are producing evidence to the contrary. In other words, the AHA is effectively blocking progress in medical science, and, perhaps most egregiously, it is promoting a diet that’s actively harming our cardiovascular health. In the beginning, however, the association’s culture was very different. When the AHA was founded in 1924, it was supported only with annual dues from a small collection of doctors concerned about the growing problem of heart disease. Heart attacks skyrocketed after World War I, and the organization felt the pressure of knowing there was so much to learn but such little funding to do the necessary research. In 1942, AHA executive director H. M. “Jack” Marvin, a New Haven, Connecticut, cardiologist, made an ambitious proposal to solve the AHA’s “chronic fiscal problems.” Lack of funds stood in the way of two of the organization’s highest-priority goals: sponsoring research and establishing public health and lay education programs. Without fundraising, the organization would be limited to utilizing the small pool of government funds to achieve its goals. And that pool had just grown a little too crowded for the AHA’s tastes.
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Cate Shanahan (Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back)
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Hal Gregersen, the executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, confirmed my suspicions with actual research. In interviews with five hundred well-established entrepreneurs and inventors, he found that about a third attributed their innovative ability to the early support of either Montessori teachers, or teachers in what Gregersen deemed Montessori-like schools.
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Bina Venkataraman (The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age)
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Questioning cultures, by generating self-confidence, also tend to encourage adaptability in meeting new challenges. People who are comfortable with questions are nimble in adjusting to fluid change and limber in their thinking in the face of new data or realities. They can juggle demands without losing focus or energy. They are comfortable with ambiguity. Questioning leaders are likely to remain calm and clear-headed under high stress or during a crisis, and to remain unflappable when confronted by trying situations. Robert Hoffman, executive director of human resources and organizational development at Novartis, highlights this aspect of a questioning culture:
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Michael J. Marquardt (Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask)
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handled, he was stunned into silence to the point where I wondered whether he was still connected. Finally, after clearing his throat, he talked with me about the specifics of all that it would entail. I told him that secrecy was the foremost priority. Over the next few months, the details were arranged. I went to Howie’s office two more times and met with the representatives from Sotheby’s. I met again with the executive directors of various Jewish charities; the sums they would receive obviously depended on the auction itself and how much money the collection would fetch. To that end, appraisers spent weeks cataloging and photographing the entire collection, estimating value, and establishing provenance. Eventually, a catalog was sent for my approval. The estimated value of the collection was mind-boggling even to me, but again it did not matter. When
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Nicholas Sparks (The Longest Ride)
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The “foreign hand” was Avaaz.org, an organisation that promotes pro-democracy movements through the Internet, social media, phones and sometimes with the help of citizen journalists. Avaaz was co-founded in 2007 by Res Publica, a global civic advocacy group, and Moveon.org, an online community for Internet advocacy in the US. The founding team had social entrepreneurs from six countries, including president and executive director Ricken Patel, Tom Perriello, Tom Pravda, Eli Pariser, Andrea Woodhouse, Jeremy Heimans, and David Madden. By 2011, Avaaz had run a total of 750 pro-democracy campaigns worldwide. Widely regarded as the largest global political web movement in history, Avaaz’s website is blocked in China and Iran.
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Ullekh N.P. (War Room: The People, Tactics and Technology behind Narendra Modi's 2014 Win)
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The leader beyond the millennium will not be the leader who has learned the lessons of how to do.... The leader of today and the future will be focused on how to be ... how to develop quality, character, mind-set, values, principles, and courage. —Frances Hesselbein
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Mim Carlson (The Executive Director's Guide to Thriving as a Nonprofit Leader (The Jossey-Bass Nonprofit Guidebook Series 7))
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Okay. Maybe each of us really needs a no-nonsense Builder to keep our finances in order, map our vacations, and make sure the cats have their latest battery of rabies shots. Perhaps that would make sense. But is that what our hearts secretly ache for? As Fisher starts out, her evidence is mostly anecdotal. She describes a classic match. Picture a hard-driving man, a fabulously successful business executive. He bangs heads, slashes the payroll, drives would-be challengers into oblivion. This guy gets things done. He's a Director. And chances are, FIsher says, he has a smooth-talking, problem solving wife, who quietly patches together all the friendships he shatters. She's a Negotiator. Those two types, Fisher says, "are very symbiotic. They will gravitate toward each other.
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Stephen Baker (The Numerati)
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The future executive director of the NAACP, Walter White,
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Rawn James Jr. (The Double V: How Wars, Protest, and Harry Truman Desegregated America’s Military)
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—DON M. GREEN is Executive Director of the nonprofit Napoleon Hill Foundation, a position he has held for fourteen years. Don is a board member of The University of Virginia/Wise and president of the University of Virginia/Wise Foundation Board. Prior to his position with the Napoleon Hill Foundation, he was a bank
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Jim Stovall (Wisdom for Winners Volume One: A Millionaire Mindset, An Official Official Publication of The Napoleon Hill Foundation)
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In this instance, strength with control will bring about the desired result. One can describe forte piano as the sudden application of pressure and then release. It is the surprising occurrence of tension followed by immediate relaxation. It is like the blow of a rubber-headed hammer and the resultant bounce-off from the object hit. We are dealing with techniques and skill in this musical framework, and as directors we should be able to demonstrate vocally for our singers or instrumentally for our players. One can verbalize in an extended and elaborate procedure as to how a forte piano should be executed, but the skillful musical demonstration will accomplish the purpose immediately. I think of the fireworks at Disneyland on a summer evening. Always at the end of the show will be the beautiful starbursts—a sudden explosion of the missile high in the air, the immediate quiet spread of a colorful star-flower expanding in all its beauty. This is forte piano. There will be a coming again in the skies by the Lord Jesus Christ for his church. It will be sudden. Sudden, as revealed in Scripture. The prophets predicted it, Christ promised it, apostles proclaimed it, heaven preached it, and Christians continue to expect it. As he announced his death, so he prophetically told of his return. Three times, in the last chapter of Revelation, he affirms this. Surely I am coming quickly. Revelation 22:20 It will be a sudden time with the beginning of an immediate release from the tensions and pressures of life. Yes, that will be the final victory, because of Jesus Christ.
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Jack Coleman (Crescendos and Diminuendos: Meditations for Musicians and Music Lovers)
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A famous case involved U2 guitarist “The Edge,” who purchased 156 acres of wild chaparral but wanted to build five mansions on it. Needless to say there was going to be a significant disruption of the fragile habitat, and his building plans were rejected. The executive director of the Coastal Commission called it “one of the three worst projects that I’ve seen in terms of environmental devastation.” Their refusal to rubber-stamp projects is proof that local government can indeed protect the habitats and species of ecologically fragile areas.
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Greg Graffin (Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence)
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At Google, a newly hired software engineer gets access to almost all of our code on the first day. Our intranet includes product roadmaps, launch plans, and employee snippets (weekly status reports) alongside employee and team quarterly goals (called OKRs, for “Objectives and Key Results”… I’ll talk more about them in chapter 7), so that everyone can see what everyone else is working on. A few weeks into every quarter, our executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, walks the company through the same presentation that the board of directors saw just days before. We share everything, and trust Googlers to keep the information confidential.
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Laszlo Bock (Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead)
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Hollywood Rule:
RULE #1: You only need a license to do three things in the film business: blow up a building, wash someone’s hair, or drive a truck. You need no license, certification, documentation, or, for that matter, any filmmaking experience to be a writer, producer, director, actor, or even a studio executive. All you need is money.
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David Marder
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Elly Kleinman Siyum Hashas
Elly Kleinman (born 1952) is an American business executive and philanthropist best known as the founder and CEO of The Americare Companies.[1] He is the Co-Chairman of OHEL Board of Directors, Chairman of Camp Kylie Board of Trustees and Former Trustee of the Maimonides Medical Center. In 2012 he was the Chairman of 12th Elly Kleinman Siyum HaShas
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Elly Kleinman
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Of course, to properly reward the “doers” you must correctly define what a doer is. This is central to the idea of execution. Simply put, a doer is a person who gets things done. Doing is meeting goals. Some goals are legitimately short-term goals that yield short-term results and are properly compensated on a short-term basis. But other goals are long-term and by definition we will not know if we have achieved those goals for some time. Consequently the people striving to meet those goals should be compensated on a long-term basis, with some portion of that long- term compensation based on achieving critical milestones toward the goal. And there are some goals that are so long- term that compensation should only be awarded when a person retires and his or her contributions to meeting those extremely long-term goals can be assessed. Leaders must take responsibility for setting the right rewards for doers. This is particularly true of boards of directors, many of which made egregiously bad calls in rewarding poor performance by the CEOs of their companies. Linked together as these behaviors are, rewarding the doers must be based on the correct metrics. For too long companies—and this often involved boards of directors— set “shareholder value” as one of the goals to be measured and rewarded in compensation plans. But the directors and CEOs who set shareholder value as a goal missed an essential point. Increasing shareholder value is an outcome, not a goal. If you set the right strategy with the right goals and execute well to implement the strategy and achieve the goals—growth in earnings per share, good cash flow, improved market share, for example—then shareholder value is the result. Get everything else right and shareholder value will take care of itself. EXPAND
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Larry Bossidy (Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done)
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Well written and easy to enjoy." executive director of Association of Science and Technology Museums
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Bud Rock
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Why is that so hard? Because “the one big bug we have as humans is that we are tribal,” answers Marina Gorbis, executive director at the Institute for the Future. “We always need the group to give us identity. We are wired that way. From the first campfire, human beings evolved as tribal beings.” And
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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One cannot examine the actions of the Secret Service on November 22, 1963, without concluding that the Service stood down on protecting President Kennedy. Indeed, the 120-degree turn into Dealey Plaza violates Secret Service procedures, because it required the presidential limousine to come to a virtual stop. The reduction of the president’s motorcycle escort from six police motorcycles to two and the order for those two officers to ride behind the presidential limousine also violates standard Secret Service procedure. The failure to empty and secure the tall buildings on either side of the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza likewise violates formal procedure, as does the lack of any agents dispersed through the crowd gathered in Dealey Plaza. Readers who are interested in a comprehensive analysis of the Secret Service’s multiple failures and the conspicuous violation of longstanding Secret Service policies regarding the movement and protection of the president on November 22, 1963, should read Vince Palamara’s Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect. The difference in JFK Secret Service protection and its adherence to the services standard required procedures in Chicago and Miami would be starkly different from the arrangements for Dallas. Palamara established that Agent Emory Roberts worked overtime to help both orchestrate the assassination and cover up the unusual actions of the Secret Service in the aftermath. Roberts was commander of the follow-up car trailing the presidential limousine. Roberts covered up the escapades of his fellow secret servicemen at The Cellar, a club in downtown Ft. Worth, where agents, some directly responsible for the safety of President Kennedy during the motorcade, drank until dawn on November 22. He also ordered a perplexed agent Donald Lawton off the back of the presidential limousine while at Love Field, thus giving the assassins clearer, more direct shots and more time to get them off. Also, although Roberts recognized rifle fire being discharged in Dealey Plaza, he neglected to mobilize any of the agents under his watch to act. To mask the inactivity of his agents, Roberts, in sworn testimony, falsely increased the speed of the cars (from 9–11 mph to 20–25 mph) and the distance between them (from five feet to 20–25 feet).85 No analysis of the Secret Service’s actions on the day of the assassination can be complete without mentioning that Secret Service director James Rowley was a former FBI agent and close ally of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as well as a crony of Lyndon Johnson. Hoover was one of Johnson’s closest associates. The FBI Director would take the unusual step of flying to Dallas for a victory celebration in 1948 when Johnson illegally stole his Senate seat through election fraud. Johnson and Hoover were neighbors in the Foxhall Road area of the District of Columbia. Hoover’s budget would virtually triple during the years LBJ dominated the appropriations process as Senate Majority Leader. Rowley was a protégé of the director and one of the few men who left the FBI on good terms with Hoover. Rowley’s first public service job in the Roosevelt administration was arranged for him by LBJ. The neglect of assigning even one Secret Service agent to secure Dealey Plaza, as well as cleaning blood and other relatable pieces of evidence from the presidential limousine immediately following the assassination, seizing Kennedy’s body from Parkland Hospital to prevent a proper, well-documented autopsy, failing to record Oswald’s interrogation—all were important pieces of the assassination deftly executed by Rowley.
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Roger Stone (The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ)
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In 1956 a rather delicate assignment came my way. I visited Switzerland at the invitation of Nestle but with a very specific brief from the Ministry of Industries, Government of India. Industries and Commerce Minister, Manubhai Shah, wanted me to ask the executives at Nestle what they were up to in our country. Under the excuse of producing condensed milk, they were importing not just milk powder, but also sugar and the tin plate for the cans! On my arrival at the airport at Nestle’s headquarters at Vevey, a Nestle car, about a mile long, was waiting to whisk me off to the best hotel in town where they put me up. I met with Kreeber, one of their two managing directors, and some other officers. The discussions turned pretty heated. I told them that my government had given them a licence to set up a plant in India so that they would produce condensed milk from Indian milk, not from imported ingredients. The Managing Director told me that it was not possible to produce condensed milk from buffalo milk, which was available in India. I said to him, ‘If you don’t know how to make it, come to me. I will teach you because I believe we can make it out of buffalo milk. I know it is more complicated than making it from cow’s milk and there are problems, but they are not insurmountable problems.’ When I assured them that it could be done, they said that their experts would have to come and set up their plant. Then they wanted the entire share capital in their hands. In those days government allowed only 49 per cent share capital to foreigners; 51 per cent had to be Indian. Kreeber said they could not agree to that. So I showed them a way out of that too. I said that 49 per cent could be with Nestle Alimentana and 51 per cent could be owned by Nestle India and in this way the entire project could stay in their hands. I was, in fact, facilitating their entry here. Ultimately, the Director agreed to set up a plant in India. At this point I told him that they could bring in any number of foreign experts they liked but my government hoped that, in five years, Indians who would be trained for the purpose would replace these experts. Kreeber’s response to this was that the production of condensed milk was an extremely delicate procedure and they ‘could not leave it to the natives to make’. At this, I lost my temper. Getting to my feet, I thumped the table loudly and said: ‘Please remember that you are speaking to a damned “native”. If you are suggesting that even after five years of training, the “natives” are not fit to occupy any position of authority in Nestle you are insulting my country. My country knows how to do without you.’ And I stormed out of the meeting – which I hope was what any self-respecting Indian would have done.
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Verghese Kurien (I Too Had a Dream)
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Although a partner’s compensation depends in large part on the amount of business he brings to the Firm, no one goes out to knock on doors. The Firm waits for the phone to ring. And ring it does, not because McKinsey sells, but because McKinsey markets. It does this in several different ways, all of them designed to make sure that on the day a senior executive decides she has a business problem, one of the first calls she makes is to the local office of McKinsey. The Firm produces a steady stream of books and articles, some of them extremely influential, such as the famous In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman.* McKinsey also publishes its own scholarly journal, The McKinsey Quarterly, which it sends gratis to its clients, as well as to its former consultants, many of whom now occupy senior positions at potential clients. The Firm invites (and gets) a lot of coverage by journalists. Many McKinsey partners and directors are internationally known as experts in their fields.
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Ethan M. Rasiel (The McKinsey Way)
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A 50-deck PowerPoint presentation of the strategy may impress the board of directors, but it won’t impress the competition or angry customers. Execution is the only competitive advantage. Strategy can only be realized through execution.
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John R. Childress (FASTBREAK: The CEO's Guide to Strategy Execution)
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Mr. Banga remembers this episode well. “We started the session. All the directors stood up and presented their individual business plans and then I handed the floor to CK. It’s amazing how quickly he got all the wives into the discussion and within 10 minutes there were a couple of home truths on the table.” The wives were brutally honest. They said Unilever’s product quality did not deserve the price premium. Executives got to see how bitter home truths really are.
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Benedict Paramanand (CK Prahalad: The Mind of the Futurist - Rare Insights on Life, Leadership & Strategy)
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With the average tenure of sales directors being three years, it’s not too great a stretch to conclude that they spend their first 12 months finding out what’s broken, the next 12 months papering over the cracks, and the final 12 months shopping their CV for a new job.
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Nicholas A.C. Read (Selling to the C-Suite: What Every Executive Wants You to Know About Successfully Selling to the Top)