Aug 30 2010

Davis Leadership Center, Business School Sponsor Sally Helgesen

Category: Davis Leadership Center — admin @ 12:26 PM

Author, speaker Sally Helgesen will be at JU to talk about women’s leadership capabilities

By Tracy Jones, Friday, August 27, 2010

Florida Times-Union – page 1, ‘Skirt’

http://jacksonville.skirt.com/articles/author-speaker-sally-helgesen-will-be-ju-talk-about-women%E2%80%99s-leadership-capabilities

Author, speaker Sally Helgesen will be at JU to talk about women’s leadership capabilities

By Tracy Jones, Friday, August 27, 2010

Magnify

Sally Helgesen, an author and speaker, will conduct forums Wednesday at Jacksonville University’s Davis Leadership Center on women in leadership and how they can successfully pilot organizations in a technology-driven environment.
Helgesen was chosen as one of the top 20 business thought leaders in the U.S. by “Best Practices Institute,” and her new book, “The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work” was published in July.
Skirt! recently spoke to Helgesen on the phone from her Hudson Valley, N.Y., home. 
 
What do you plan to talk about at your JU appearance?
What I’m going to be emphasizing here is not just women’s leadership capabilities, but how we can build organizations and communities that are much better at taking advantage of what the best qualities are in women and business.
 
What is your book, “The Female Vision” about?
It is about what women bring as strengths to the organizations in terms of their strategic abilities. One of the things I’ve learned from my research on the new book is that woman often have a capacity for noticing a lot of different things at one time instead of just focusing on one thing. Another thing I’ve learned doing this research is that women and men have a lot of motivating factors at work that are very similar, and one of them is a great desire to feel authentic and find a congruence between what they see as their best talents, and how the organization values them.
 
Do you think organizations are recognizing those skills?
I’ve been in this field for over 20 years, and I’ve seen much more acceptance and recognition of what women have to contribute. However, I also see that women still face certain challenges. 
 
What type of challenges?
The primary ones, I believe, while women are extremely good at building relationships, they’re often not as good as leveraging those relationships, both to further their own career and create change in the organization. Women will often hang back in terms of articulating what they have to offer. Women still have significant challenges around setting boundaries among 24/7 demands. 
 
How do women lead differently than men?
What I saw from the diary studies I did of women readers there [in the first book, “The Female Advantage”], women tend to evaluate the success on their organizations based on the quality of relationships within them. Women tend to, having been outsiders themselves, understand instinctively diversity as an advantage because they’ve been unexpected at the table, so they’re often likely to view that as an advantage. Women often don’t compartmentalize their lives as much … Women often don’t have the time to compartmentalize their lives. Women often prefer leading from the center than from the top and putting themselves in the center of people and bringing people around them. 
 
Do you think these characteristics still hold true 20 years after your first book published?
I do. What I think has changed in 20 years, I think men have more permission than they did in the past to share in these characteristics. Men feel more sense of permission to not compartmentalize their lives. I think that the characteristics that really distinguish women leadership at its best 20 years ago has become much more mainstream, and that’s a very good thing.
 
How does it feel to be named one of the top 20 business thought leaders?
Considering the company I’m in, it feels wonderful. I take a lot of pride in it, because I feel that the work I’ve done really represents what’s best in women. I see that as an acknowledgement of the importance of what women have to contribute rather than just an honor for myself.
 
For information on Helgesen’s appearances at JU, visit her website at sallyhelgesen.com or the Davis Leadership Center’s site at ju.edu/leadership, or call (904) 256-7426.
 
tracy.jones@jacksonville.com,
 (904) 359-4272

Aug 28 2010

Contented Cows? Contented People?

Category: Davis Leadership Center — admin @ 7:36 AM

Cute little study from the UK about how individualized attention for milk cows actually results in better production.  Hmmm.  Applications to the workplace?  You betcha.

And, before you dismiss the study, the low-end performers weren’t sent-off to the butcher.  All of the workers — um, that is, cows — in the study were actually milkers. 

Neat little article.  // Dr Donnie Horner

Cows with names produce more milk, scientists say

Cows with names produce more milk than those animals who are not named, scientists have found. 

By Caroline Gammell
Published: 12:01AM GMT 28 Jan 2009

Cows with names produce more milk, scientists say

Cows with names produce more milk, scientists say Photo: GETTY

Ermintrude, Daisy and La vache qui rit may produce as much as 454 pints more each year than cows with no names.

In a study involving 516 dairy farmers in the UK, Dr Catherine Douglas and Dr Peter Rowlinson at Newcastle University found that treating the animals as individuals also increased production. 

The average amount of milk produced by a cow over its annual 10 month lactation period is 13,198 pints (7,500 litres). Those cows with names had an average higher milk yield of 454 pints (258 litres).

Dr Douglas, from the School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development at Newcastle University, said: “Just as people respond better to the personal touch, cows also feel happier and more relaxed if they are given a bit more one-to-one attention.

“Many farmers dote on their cows and have long thought that such interaction helps, but it has never really been tested.

“The statistics were significantly different for those cows with name – there was nothing else which could explain it.”

The study, published in the academic journal Anthrozoos which looks at interaction between people and animals, found milk yield to be lower on farms where cattle were herded as a group.

Nearly two thirds – 60 per cent – of UK farmers said they “knew all the cows in the herd” and 48 per cent agreed that positive human contact was more likely to produce cows with a good milking temperament.

Almost 10 per cent said that a fear of humans resulted in a poor milking temperament.

Dr Douglas said: “Our data suggests that on the whole UK dairy farmers regard their cows as intelligent beings capable of experiencing a range of emotions.

“Placing more importance on knowing the individual animals and calling them by name can – at no extra cost to the farmer – also significantly increase milk production.

“Maybe people can be less self conscious and not worry about chatting to their cows.”

Dairy farmer Dennis Gibb, who owns Eachwick Red House Farm near Newcastle with his brother Richard, said treating every cow as an individual was “vitally important”.

“They aren’t just our livelihood – they’re part of the family,” he said. “We love our cows and every one of them has a name.

“Collectively we refer to them as ‘our ladies’ but we know every one of them and each one has her own personality.”

Aug 24 2010

Teaching Values to Business Students: At Davis, We DO!

Category: Davis Leadership Center — admin @ 7:45 AM

Nice article in a recent Wall Street Journal addressing the need for business schools to teach not only leadership and ethics, but values.  Proud to say “we got the memo” some time ago.  Our offerings include a multitude of leadership & ethics courses, and a commitment to build leaders of character to serve the community — business & otherwise. 

Happy reading.  // Dr. Donnie Horner

  • AUGUST 23, 2010

    • Promises Aren’t Enough: Business Schools Need to Do a Better Job Teaching Students Values 

     

    • It is a sign of the times that hundreds of Harvard Business School’s 2009 and 2010 graduates took “The MBA Oath.” These students promised to “serve the greater good,” act ethically, and refrain from pursuing greed at others’ expense.

    Journal Report

    Read the complete WSJ Executive Adviser report .

    Rich Lyons, dean of University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of business, is leading an overhaul of the school’s curriculum, with special attention to who it admits and how instructors develop innovative and responsible leaders. He talks with Careers editor Jennifer Merritt.

    We are inspired that students who will soon be in positions of leadership vow to reject the temptations their predecessors could not. But they and the more than 100,000 new M.B.A. students who enrolled this year will need more than an oath if they wish to become ethical business leaders. Simply put, such oaths sound much like chastity vows taken by thousands of teens every year. The problem in both cases is not a lack of sincerity, but a failure to adequately prepare for the moment of truth.

    Just Words

    Like a chastity vow, the M.B.A. oath has an unstated assumption that those who have gone before are somehow different: They had weaker wills, less resolve, looser morals. The oath is meant to signal a stronger commitment to values. The danger is the false sense of moral inoculation such oaths engender. Just as teenagers who take a chastity vow in lieu of better sexual education are more vulnerable to the consequences of unprotected sex—vow takers are actually more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior—M.B.A.s who take an ethics oath without enough supporting leadership education are likely more vulnerable to ethical breaches.

    The power of the situation, and our too frequent disregard for it, is an overarching lesson from sociology and social psychology. Situational forces drive behavior to a surprising extent, much more than expected by those who believe character determines all.

    This lesson has been implicated in one scandal after another, from Enron to Abu Ghraib. Pledges made without the benefit of experience with compromising situations, and without some kind of supporting structure, actually exacerbate the problem.

    The Schools’ Role

    For Further Reading

    Related articles from MIT Sloan Management Review

    The Education of Practicing Managers
    By Jonathan Gosling and Henry Mintzberg (Summer 2004)
    Companies and business schools must work together to reinvent management education, rooting it in the context of managers’ practical experiences, shared insights and thoughtful reflection.

    How to Make Values Count in Everyday Decisions
    By Joel E. Urbany, Thomas J. Reynolds and Joan M. Phillips (Summer 2008)
    A comprehensive analytic framework can provide a common language for discussing decisions and values with colleagues, helping to build a culture that better integrates the organization’s values into staff decision making.

    The Importance of Meaningful Work
    By Christopher Michaelson (Winter 2010)
    Too often, business students see little overlap between the jobs they plan to do and those they consider most socially responsible or would most enjoy.

    Should business schools play a role? Some pundits think not. They believe that schools should train managers in narrower elements of business strategy—negotiation, incentives and the like—and leave the teaching of values to others.

    We couldn’t disagree more.

    Business education is much more scientific than it was in its early years. It has been made more rigorous by the rising influence of statistics and economics. We believe in analytics. Most organizations need more analytics.

    But analytics are not a substitute for values. Indeed, an overreliance on analytics leaves managers poorly prepared to lead in moments when statistics obscure the full human dimensions of a choice.

    It also isn’t that M.B.A. programs haven’t taught leadership and ethics. They have. But most do it poorly. Leadership courses tend to emphasize such things as social influence and public speaking, while ethics courses often focus on legal aspects. This leaves the connection between values, leadership and action underdeveloped. Leadership entails thinking beyond the day’s crises to focus on the longer term, grasping the impact of decisions on broader constituencies, and sensing a responsibility that goes far beyond the immediate result of a decision.

    M.B.A. students are too often unaware of this. For example, in workshops at a leading business school, students are asked to list the qualities that a successful business leader should possess. While vision and business acumen are invariably among the first qualities listed, honesty and responsibility for others emerge only after considerable discussion. Meanwhile, when asked about the characteristics they most value in human beings, compassion, integrity, and responsibility always appear at the top of the list.

    Taking an oath of ethical leadership is not enough to bridge this gap, and recusing ourselves from teaching leadership makes it worse.

    No Substitute for Experience

    We need to better prepare our students for leadership. This requires creating a deeper understanding of the difficult decisions they will face, often under enormous pressure. We must make them aware that these decisions will challenge their values, and that, consequently, they need to clarify the values they stand for. We need to make sure they engage in a continuing dialogue with classmates, faculty and alumni, and learn to hold themselves and their peers accountable for the commitments they make.

    We have found this is best achieved through experiential learning. This approach is necessary because students otherwise find it far too easy to believe they would never engage in the reprehensible behavior that others have. It is better to make M.B.A. students viscerally aware of the tendency to compartmentalize values, and, consequently, how vulnerable they are to ethical breaches in challenging situations. If they are to learn what to expect, students must be brought face-to-face with the pressures that profit-maximization will create for them

    Throughout this process, M.B.A. programs can leverage the small group structure they deploy for study groups to generate a deeper dialogue among students who know and trust each other. Schools should do more to ensure that this dialogue develops into an ethical support structure after graduation. Alumni often mention that the hardest decisions they make occur when job demands conflict with their values. And, importantly, that they are isolated when making them.

    We need to ease this burden by being more creative in our use of technology, and more intentional in our use of alumni gatherings. It is ironic that schools exert enormous effort to create alumni networks that facilitate regular business transactions while our alumni must make their hardest choices alone.

    The solution to ethical challenges in business is not to create an army of M.B.A.s who promise to do the right thing. Rather, as educators we must assume more responsibility by providing better, not less, leadership development. Only then might our graduates take an oath they can actually live up to.

     Dr. Canales and Dr. Massey are assistant professors, and Dr. Wrzesniewski is an associate professor, of organizational behavior at Yale University’s School of Management. They can be reached at
    reports@wsj.com.

     

     

    Aug 18 2010

    Identifying Future Leaders

    Category: Davis Leadership Center — admin @ 3:37 PM

    Great little article here from Industry Week . . .timely . . . and a good read.  // Dr. Donnie Horner

    From IndustryWeek
    Identifying Your Future Leaders

    Sustained, committed leadership development can be a key differentiator between the most successful manufacturers and the also-rans. Are you taking care of your talent pipeline?

    Wednesday, August 18, 2010
    By  Steve Minter

    A group of General Mills’ senior managers recently had a chance to interact with one of history’s great explorers — Sir Ernest Shackleton, who had to abandon his ship, the Endurance, trapped in the ice of the Antarctic waters, in November 1915 and then led one of the most famous and dangerous missions in history to rescue his crew.

    Shackleton, played by a New York actor, was part of a program held every two to three years by General Mills called “Building Great Leaders.” Groups of the company’s 500 top managers take a day to individually sit down with a human resources manager, review results of their 360-degree feedback and two personality assessments, then listen to a senior vice president address leadership issues. As a result of these discussions, managers take the development plans they have brought with them and modify them based on this information. Later, managers take part in the two-hour theatrical experience set up in press-conference format to explore the themes of what makes a great leader.

    “We communicate with the participants’ managers after the course to ensure that there is dialog and discussion after the program,” reports Beth Gunderson, director of organizational effectiveness at General Mills.

     

    The “Building Great Leaders” program is just one part of the leadership development program at General Mills, but it is indicative of the company’s wholesale commitment to developing leaders throughout their careers and to making mentoring and other development activities an important part of each manager’s responsibilities. The reason is fairly simple, according to Gunderson. Based on the company’s internal and external research, she states, “If you have better leaders, you will see better business results.”

    Faced with a harsh economy and the need to conserve cash, many companies trimmed severely or even eliminated their leadership training programs in the past couple years. Plenty of other companies have no real program for identifying and developing talent. But mounting evidence shows these companies are putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

    In May 2009, Deloitte, The Manufacturing Institute and Oracle conducted a survey of large manufacturing organizations. While 55% of companies with top-quartile profitability rated themselves “high” in linking their people strategy to their business strategy, only 30% of the companies in the bottom quartile of profitability did so.

    In 2009, Hewitt Associates conducted the most recent of five studies dating back to 2002 looking at talent management and leadership practices. This research shows a link between financial success and leadership practices such as comprehensive succession planning and the dedication of senior leaders to talent development.

    Earlier this year, the American Management Association commissioned the Institute for Corporate Productivity to conduct a study on global leadership development. The study found a “significant statistical correlation” between the degree to which respondents said their firms have global leadership development programs and improved market performance.

    The focus on talent development comes as many businesses assess the impact of the upcoming baby boomer exit. “There are 76 million boomers and they are turning 65 at the rate of one every eight seconds,” notes Bonnie Hagemann, the CEO of Executive Development Associates. “There are 11% fewer Gen Xers. There will be a drop in the number of employees and then there is the issue of which ones are ready to leave.”

    Filling the talent pipeline to avoid a leadership void in the future was just one of the motivations for W.R. Grace (IW 500: No. 256), the $2.8 billion specialty chemicals manufacturer, to develop a manufacturing leadership program in 2002. “We made a conscious effort to design a program where we could hire in some really talented people off college campuses, provide a two-year rotational development program for them where they are going to get exposed to different aspects of the manufacturing and operations world, and then be primed to be candidates for leadership openings as we continue to grow and develop our organization,” explains Troy Vincent, Grace’s vice president for global talent acquisition.

    Vincent said the company looks for college students with a technical degree, such as chemical engineering or chemistry. Grace also looks for evidence of leadership qualities, such as becoming president of a fraternity or becoming a supervisor in a job they hold while going to school. In addition, the company provides internships to students and frequently offers promising interns jobs after they graduate.

    Such was the case with Jennifer Summerhill, who interned two summers at Grace before graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with a chemical engineering degree. She was recruited into the Leadership Program and did rotations in Cambridge, Mass., as a Six Sigma black belt leading projects in different plants, in Houston as a plant manager, and in Mt. Pleasant, Tenn., as a process engineer.

    Summerhill praises the leadership program for providing her the responsibility she desired but also structure and mentoring. She says she has learned a good deal in the past two years about working with different personalities and refining her communications and interpersonal skills. In some cases, that meant finding ways to encourage and influence employees to do things rather than giving an order and becoming upset if there was pushback. Recently, Summerhill took a position as an environmental specialist, but she admits her goal “is to get back in the plant and be a plant manager.”

    Aug 02 2010

    Leadership Training Gains Urgency Amid Stronger Economy

    Category: Davis Leadership Center — admin @ 8:08 AM

    Great article in The Wall Street Journal about the relative resurgence in leadership training.  Funny how when things are going bad the first thing ‘cut’ is training and education, particularly for leaders.  When, do you think, leaders need training most?

    Here’s the link:    

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703314904575399260976490670.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

    Leadership Training Gains Urgency Amid Stronger Economy

     

    By JOE LIGHT

    Fearing a shortage of qualified managers as business picks up, some companies are bolstering leadership-development efforts.Layoffs and training cutbacks in the past two years have thinned manager pipelines. And employers worry that baby boomers who postponed retirement during the recession will start to depart as recovering stock prices reinflate retirement funds.

    Amway is struggling to fill management vacancies. Above, a man works near an Amway showroom in Taipei.

     Already, some companies say they are finding they don’t have the managers to spearhead new projects or step in for departing executives, a problem as companies try to shift into growth mode.

    Employers cut spending on training by 11% in both 2009 and 2008, according to human-resources consulting firm Bersin & Associates LLC. Now about half of companies plan to increase their leadership-development budgets in 2010, according to a Bersin survey of 750 corporations conducted in May. Almost a quarter plan to increase spending by more than 10% this year.

    In addition, 88% of about 400 human-resources executives said they have recently revamped, or plan to revamp, their leadership-related training and development programs, according to a May survey by Mercer, a consulting unit of Marsh & McLennan Cos.

    Direct seller Amway Corp. put on hold plans for two new leadership-development programs amid the slump last year. Now executives are having a hard time finding strong managers to fill vacancies.

    “We’re finding times when we want to open a new market but don’t have anyone with the capabilities to do it,” says Larry Looker, Amway’s manager of global leadership development. “It’s a real weakness.”

    When it sought country managers to support sales people for an expansion in Latin America, for example, Amway couldn’t find suitable candidates in its local operations. Instead, in some cases it had to hire managers from other companies and transfer its own managers from North America, Mr. Looker says.

    Amway plans to restart the two programs that it put on hold—for midlevel managers and manufacturing supervisors—over the course of the next year. It is also trying to better coordinate movement across divisions, so that hiring managers in one location know about openings and possible candidates in others.

    In the meantime, Amway is hiring some managers from outside the company. But that can be expensive and risky, as it is hard to tell whether the hire will fit in, says Mr. Looker. “It’s easier and cheaper to build someone up into a leader from within,” he says.

    Mr. Looker expects the leadership crunch to become more acute as early as 2012, when Amway anticipates a wave of retirements. “We’re starting to realize that this problem will become urgent, fast,” he says.

    Defense contractor Rockwell Collins Inc. is bolstering its leadership-development programs this year, too. It didn’t put efforts on hold during the recession, but executives worry that as the economy improves, more of its executives will retire, creating holes lower down.

    Rockwell started a so-called company university this year, partly to help engineers becoming managers gain leadership skills.

    In the past, Rockwell had noticed that the projects of some engineers who had recently become managers were often falling behind schedule, says Rod Dooley, vice president of talent management and diversity. The company had leadership programs before, but they were unconnected and inconsistent, Mr. Dooley says.

    By the end of this year, would-be managers will have to complete certain courses before being promoted. And when they start their new jobs, they will often get paired up with a more senior manager to help them through the transition.

    Rockwell also now makes managers discuss employees’ career trajectories at their performance reviews. Managers must identify staffers who could succeed them, and let those people participate in training programs.

    “We don’t have a lot of time,” Mr. Dooley says. “We need to have a leadership pipeline in place now.”

    Jul 18 2010

    You can “catch” happiness. Or sadness.

    Category: Davis Leadership Center — admin @ 10:08 AM

    Debbie Downer.  No fun to be around her, is it?

    Birds of a feather .  . . yeah . . . they flock together.

    Want to be a winner . . . hang with winners.

    Remember all of these ‘sayings’ and ‘words of wisdom’ from your elders.  Turns out, they’re right.

    For years social psychologists have known that social contagion occurs — that we can become “infected” with a sentiment from someone else.   It works particularly nicely — or, maybe, not so nicely — in crowds.  Heard of “crowd behavior,” right?  Extending this research has been the work of Stanford’s Bob Sutton, whose popular The No Asshole Rule [yes, that's the proper title of this New York Times best seller]  has argued that a toxic boss can make for a toxic workplace. 

    Now more research reinforces the notion that we can “catch” happiness.  Or sadness.  Want to be happy and more productive?  Surround yourself — hang with — happy, productive people.

    Nice little article off of the AP-wire below, as published in the Los Angeles Times.  Be careful who you hire.  And retain.  And promote.  The organizational climate you create is likely of your own doing.

    Enjoy.

    Dr. Donnie Horner //

    How are sadness and happiness like diseases? They’re infectious, study finds

    July 08, 2010|By Rachel Bernstein, Los Angeles Times
    Is sadness a sickness? It appears to spread like one, a new study has found.

    Researchers at Harvard University and MIT wanted to see if a mathematical model developed to track and predict the spread of infectious diseases such as SARS and foot-and-mouth disease could also apply to the spread of happiness — and found that it worked.

    They used data collected from 1,880 subjects in the Framingham Heart Study, a long-term research effort that has followed subjects since 1948 (and added some new ones along the way), giving them physical and emotional exams every two years. At each visit, subjects were classified as content, discontent or neutral. The researchers monitored how these emotional states changed over time and how these changes depended on the emotions of the people with whom the participants came into contact.

    When the information was put into a traditional infectious-disease simulation, slightly modified to reflect the unique qualities of emotional spread rather than actual disease, the researchers found a correlation between an individual’s emotional state and those of the person’s contacts.

    In other words, it appears that you can catch happiness. Or sadness. Moreover, the “recovery time” doesn’t depend on your contacts at all, which is a hallmark of diseases but surprising in an emotional context, since continuing contact with happy or sad people could be expected to affect one’s emotional state even after the initial “infection.”

    People were found to “recover” (return to neutral) more quickly from discontent than from content; on average, a contentedness “infection” sticks around for 10 years, but it takes only five years to recover from discontent. While this may still seem like a long time, the work focused on long-term emotional states because they are more accurate measures of general life satisfaction than fleeting moods, which are already known to be contagious (think laughter).

    On the other hand, sadness is more contagious than happiness: A single discontent contact doubles one’s chances of becoming unhappy, while a happy contact increases the probability of becoming content by only 11%.

    Researchers also found one way that emotions act differently than diseases — they can arise due to events in your own life, such as a promotion or a disease diagnosis, rather than solely being “contagious.” In another win for the good guys, it appears that happiness is more likely to come about spontaneously than is sadness.

    A report of the emotions-as-diseases research has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

    Jul 14 2010

    From “Senior Leadership 101″: Rest & Renew in Private, Not in Public . . . Especially When It’s BP Oil Spill, Day 86

    Category: Davis Leadership Center — admin @ 12:42 PM

    Oil spill and ongoing clean-up:  Day 86.

    More public rest, recuperation, and renewal for our Senior Leader.

    Geez.  Is anyone up there listening?  Are there any advisors to the President that have passed “Senior Leadership 101″?  Is anyone advising the emperor that he has no clothes?   

    Dr DHH Jr. //

    From ABC’s Jake Tapper: 

    On her first trip to the Gulf Coast since the BP oil spill, First Lady Michelle Obama encouraged Americans to consider vacationing on the region’s beaches that have not been directly impacted by oil.

    “It is vacation time. Folks are looking for things to do with their kids, and this would be a great opportunity to do a few things — help this community, send a different message about the extent of the spill, and also think long term about how the rest of the country can help this economy and the folks down here,” Mrs. Obama said at the Panama City Welcome Center.

    From the Bangor Daily News:  http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/148373.html 

    Obamas to vacation in Maine next weekend

    7/9/10 12:00 am

    BANGOR, Maine — The first family will spend next weekend vacationing on Mount Desert Island, according to U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree.

    President Barack Obama and his family are scheduled to arrive Friday, July 16, and stay through Sunday, July 18.

    Information about where the family would stay and the sights they might take in while visiting Maine was not available Friday night. The visit is a personal family vacation and no public appearances are scheduled, Pingree said.

    “What an honor that the Obama family has chosen Maine for vacation when they could have gone anywhere in the country,” she said. “I think the Obamas will really enjoy the quiet woods, beautiful coast, wonderful people and everything else that brings thousands of families here every year.”

    While White House officials were mum about where on the island the first family would stay, Obama has political connections on MDI. George Mitchell, U.S. special envoy for Middle East peace, owns a home in Seal Harbor. Mitchell and his wife, Heather, have two children, Andrew, 12, and Claire, 9. The Obama children, Malia and Sasha, are 12 and 9, respectively.

    Last August, the first family visited Yellowstone National Park and Grand Canyon National Park. The Obamas also spent time on Martha’s Vineyard in August 2009.

    Information about whether the family would arrive in Air Force One, the presidential jet, was not available. Neither the Bar Harbor Airport in Trenton nor the Portland International Jetport has runways long enough to accommodate the Boeing 747.

    Air Force One could land at Bangor International Airport and the Obamas could take a helicopter to the airport in Trenton, then take a motorcade to MDI. Last summer, Air Force One landed on Cape Cod, the family took a helicopter to Martha’s Vineyard, then rode in a motorcade to the 28-acre compound where they stayed.

    Jul 06 2010

    BP, the Obama Administration, and Strategic Leadership

    Category: Davis Leadership Center — admin @ 7:37 AM

    See the article by Wayne Ezell in today’s Florida Times Union regarding BP’s and the Obama Administration’s handling of the gulf oil spill / crisis.  No Christmas cards this year for Dr. Horner from BP or the President.  

    http://jacksonville.com/business/2010-07-06/story/ju-expert-leadership-skewers-bp-obama-over-gulf-response

    Jul 02 2010

    Don’t Underestimate the Role of Marketing in Your Career

    Category: From Executive-in-Residence John Kaegi — admin @ 12:34 PM

    Don’t Underestimate the Role of Marketing in Your Career

    We have all heard about college courses people had to take, but took away nothing from the course that they could use in their careers or life.  Not so with marketing courses.  No matter your career path, the concepts in JU marketing courses will help you!

    We also know of students whose total focus is to get a diploma, a piece of paper that they think will guarantee them a better career.  The sad reality that these students eventually face is that careers aren’t shaped by diplomas, but by personal initiative and hard work.  Loving your profession helps too.

    When I started as chief marketing officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida in 2002, I polled the marketing staff — all 157 of them — to find out how many had marketing degrees.  Only 3 had.  The other 154 people (me included) majored in something besides marketing, but ended up there because of their creativity, their analytical skills or because they are leaders and choose to be front and center in the business.  The academic major most often cited by the other 154 was “management.”  If you are a management major, you have about a 1-in-3 chance of ending up in marketing instead.

    Even if you don’t become a marketer, you will work with marketers.  Successful businesses today require cross-functional teamwork and solution fertilization.  The more you know about the functions and framework of marketing, the more likely you will be to influence marketing outcomes and help your company win in the marketplace.

    If you’re not a marketing major still consider how important taking marketing courses can be to your career and then step up to the challenge.  As a marketing student, consider how you will retain and put into action the knowledge to which you are exposed in a marketing course.  People learn best through interaction with others, by experimenting, putting concepts into practice and by failure requiring restarts.  To ensure learning, set a goal to engage, to participate in classroom and on-line discussion and enthusiastically embrace an opportunity to put it into action in a project or simulation.  In my classes, I award a significant portion of student grades based on participation in class and discussion boards.   And all exams are on-line.  Therefore, they are open-book, but require students to “think through” the questions to find THE BEST ANSWER (not perhaps the only correct answer).  This approach seems to be antithetical to the testing experience of most students who have become comfortable memorizing answers for closed book exams.  However, employing techniques at JU such as cerebral exams and discussion engagement help students retain the most important concepts and principles that will, in turn, help them throughout their careers.

    John Kaegi // Executive in Residence, Davis College of Business

    Jul 01 2010

    Managing What You Know

    Category: From the Davis Dean: Dr. Joe McCann — admin @ 7:21 AM

    Business schools are in the knowledge management business. So are you. I just returned from a conference where the heads of “people strategy” from companies such as Tata, Unilever, and AstraZeneca were discussing how they were competing in the “global knowledge marketplace.” It is very clear that knowledge management (KM) – how you create, share, apply and retain what you know – is becoming the only true source of competitive advantage in a global economy that is destroying whatever traditional sources of advantage may still exist. This is just as true for companies, big and small, as it is for business schools, and definitely true for individuals trying to manage their careers in a shaken economy.

    Thinking about the world from a KM perspective is transformative. You’ll never see your organization the same way once you grasp it. Fundamentally, strategically managing what you know consists of asking three very tough questions: 1) “What do we know now that makes us so special?” 2) “What must we know in 5 or 10 years to still succeed in this business?” and 3) “How do we fill any gaps between what we now know and must know?” That third question calls for a KM audit where you specifically look at how you acquire new knowledge, build on it, share it across the organization, apply it effectively to products and services, and retain it.

    Too abstract? OK, let’s look at the very real consequences of weak KM. Recent research revealed that only about twenty-five percent of large companies had extensive knowledge retention plans, although forty percent of their top knowledge workers were ready to go out the door over the next five years with retirement. How can you sustain high performance when forty percent of the knowledge residing in your people exits that quickly? This is happening across almost every industry sector in the West, plus Japan. Teachers, doctors, airline pilots, even telephone linemen are on a very long list. We have not done a good job of talent management and the leadership bench strength in many organizations is simply not deep enough for such seismic shifts.

    The global economy isn’t also something still emerging; it is here, and it is an economy where entirely new competencies and skills — indeed, entirely new mindsets – are necessary. What I heard from Tata’s senior executive rocked me. We face competitors with very different ways of creating and using knowledge; Indian business schools are part of that process. Need I mention China?

    So how do you start “managing what you know”? Start with the above three questions at your next staff meeting or quarterly retreat. Start asking the big questions you will need answers for to compete in the global knowledge marketplace. Others are, and many already have answers.

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